A Minimalist Approach to Tracking Your Business Data

Written By Debbie Lee

TL;DR

You don’t need to track everything to know how your business is doing, you just need to track the right things.

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

There comes a point in every business when you need to pay attention to the numbers. Usually it happens at one of these three points:

 

  1. You want to grow your business but don’t know which offers to focus on and what marketing channels will support you in making the leap

  2. You want to work less but don’t know which of your day to day activities you can afford to let go of

  3. You want to delegate parts of your business to someone else but then realise that that ‘strategy’ you’ve relied on is actually your own gut feel which is a lot harder to outsource


What you’d love is some sort of data-driven strategy that replaces the overthinking and guesswork with confidence and ease. 

In this article I’m going to summarise how to do just that.

What is a data-driven approach?

It means tracking the right numbers in your business that allow you to ascertain where your time, energy and effort is best spent. 

Here’s how to put it into practice.

Step 1: Map Out Your Sales Pathways

For your business, list out the following:

  1. All the places people first discover you and your work. For example, word of mouth, through a guest webinar, a podcast guest interview

  2. Ways people stay in touch with you. For example, your mailing list, your own podcast or You Tube channel

  3. Ways that you invite people to buy from you. For example, in a newsletter, a sales page on your website, filling in a form

This step alone can be quite eye-opening in revealing the squiggly paths that people can take before they work with you.

Step 2: Figure Out What Works

Take a look back over the last 6-12months in your business.

  • Which of these activities have you been putting consistent effort into?

  • Where have your best clients come from?

  • Where have you been chopping and changing instead of building up momentum?


Step 3: Get Strategic

To start with, choose one path that you’d like people to take:

  • One way for people to discover you

  • One way for them to stay in touch

  • One thing for you to offer

  • One way for them to sign up to it


Put together a simple spreadsheet that tracks these numbers every month. Once you’re happy that that pathway is established, then you can add another. 

Let me know how you get on? Which step did you find most useful?

Debbie Lee
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