There was a time when you spent your ad budget and hoped it would work. I know half my advertising works, I just don’t know what half! Compare this with today’s world. Facebook gets into bed with Datalogix to work out whether Facebook advertising works. Datalogix has purchased data on 70m American households drawn from 1000 retailers. Facebook is paying Datalogix to match email addresses of these households and Facebook accounts to determine the correlation between a marketer’s spend and resulting sales! ( Of course there may be privacy concerns with this approach but marketers love to see Return On Investment numbers (ROIs) on their spend)
Do you measure the impact on your service? Do you offer up an ROI spreadsheet to allow prospects to see the value you bring. Do you go back later to understand whether the ROI was achieved. By the way it is important that the ROI tool is a spreadsheet that the customer owns and plays with. Otherwise the numbers in the spreadsheet are yours and therefore lack credibility. These days more than ever, you need to show as much evidence as possible about the business results you can achieve. Business results not features and benefits drive POs in 2012.
