Revenue Journal®

You are the head honcho at your company. You stay awake at night struggling with unsolved problems. You go into work every day and focus on solving them. Your life consists of finding and solving those problems.

You think you know more than anyone in the world about your company. You're right - no single individual knows more than you. But there is critical information that you don't know, information that is sucking the life blood out of your company's potential for growth. Information that, if you knew it, faced it, and dealt with it, you could remove those stubborn barriers to the sale and start your revenues flowing in new ways and at new rates.

The people you hire can make a big difference to your revenue growth. That's why I help CEOs find and hire the best people for each position. I've been building a marketing and sales team for one of my clients for the past few years. The people we have found are making a difference. The company's revenues are way up. The marketing and selling efforts are bearing fruit.

All of the people we've brought in are contributing. The webmaster/IT guy is technically brilliant, as well as productive and pleasant. The head of marketing loves marketing online, has a great sense of the big picture, and understands how to optimize marketing and tracking efforts. The head of sales has been working with each salesperson to improve their outgoing efforts - and has set up programs to consistently interact with existing customers, at just the right time in their buying process. Sales to new customers has increased along with sales to existing customers.

One of the most satisfying hires is the data-oriented person we brought into marketing.

There's a conflict between the information you want to get from your potential buyers - in order to market to them effectively - and the fact that asking for that information can prevent them from interacting with your website or making a purchase. Asking for too much information too soon is like the owner of a retail store "greeting" you at the entrance and forcing you to sign a guestbook before you can start shopping. Most people would decline and leave the store, which is exactly what is happening on your website - except you can't "see" them leaving without resorting to in-depth web stat log analysis.

How do you find out what you need to know without placing barriers in their way?

When you use your web tracking tool to identify the search terms that people type in before coming to your website, what you're seeing are the words that finally got them there. What you aren't seeing are the words they typed in first, at the beginning of their search.

People who are searching for your product or solution start out by typing the phrase that makes the most sense to them. Then, as they see the first set of results, they learn that their logical search term isn't producing the results they needed. They add a word or change a word, and try again. This learn-and-refine process leads to relevant result...and (hopefully) to your site.

Your web tracking tools record this last search term, but do not capture the first search term or even the interim search terms that they used to find you.