I don't know where 30% of my clients come from! - the missing third found.

You've followed all of the marketing and sales advice you can find. You and your staff ask everyone where they found you (do you ask every time? are you sure you do?). You carefully record which sites and which advertisements send the most work. You do all you can do, but for some reason you always have cases and clients which can't remember, don't know, or won't tell, so at the end of the year you have the missing third!

You have something like the following:

Web Site Directory I - 18 cases
Web Site Directory II - 10 cases
My web site - 22 cases
referrals - 20 cases
UNKNOWN - 30 cases.

So you have 100 cases, 30 of which can't be tracked! But does it matter? After all, at least you know how well those advertisements work for you. For instance, if Web Site II charges $500.00 per year, you know you spent $50.00 to acquire each new case.

If you've done your homework already, you know what a customer is worth, and you know whether $50.00 per customer is good or bad for you. So now you can decide whether to cut or keep the ad, or not! Or can you?

What if you don't want to pay $50.00 per customer, but you would accept $40.00? Is cutting the advertisement in this example a good idea? To really know, we will have to look at the 30% of the cases that we don't know where they came from. But how?

A marketer can make several assumptions to tease out where these people came from. Remember we already know where 70% of our business comes from. Also assume that the leads with no known origin probably reflect a similar distribution as the leads we do know about. (You may have never been to Idaho, Nebraska, or Indiana, but you can assume water runs down hill there too, and make plans based on those assumptions if you say travel there to raft) (You might have noticed that you can figure out what a million voters are thinking from only talking to thousands. Here, you've already talked to 70% of the "voters"!)

So what you can do is this. Web Site II gave you 10 cases out of 100 total which is 10 %, but put differently, and more relevantly, 10 leads out of 70 known leads, which is slightly more than 14%. So you can simply say that on average. 14% of your cases come from Web Site II.

Now take 14% of the 100 total cases, (water runs down hill?) and you can safely assume that Web Site II actually gave you closer to 14 cases. So we can rewrite our list above as follows:

Web Site Directory I - 25% of 100 cases = 25 cases
Web Site Directory II - 14% of 100 cases = 14 cases
My web site - 32% of 100 cases = 32 cases
referrals - 29% of 100 cases = 29 cases
UNKNOWN - 0

So rework that math. You spent $500.00 for 14 cases (not just 10) - so your cost per case falls to $500 / 14 = $35.00 per case. So if $40.00 was your cutoff, you would have canceled when you thought (mistakenly) that you were paying $50.00 per customer.

Now that you know that it is $35.00 per customer, you'll definitely keep the advertisement, and could even accept up to a 10% price increase! $550 / 14 = $39.29 per case!

So now you know where that missing third is hiding! And what ads you should be buying.

Marketing Resources & Sites You Can Use.

Here are a few marketing sites, that while general in nature, are useful to PIs & Servers.

Internet Marketing by Locker Gnome - Helpful articles and tips on internet marketing. - Many topics covered, updated regularly.


Marketing vs. Sales: What is the Difference? - by Laura Lake on About.com. - Good article, learn the difference.


MarketingProfs Daily Fix - Comprehensive & constantly refreshed general marketing blog.