Core Metric

What is your most important number?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 February 13, 2024 | [Read Online]( In reply to my last newsletter I received two questions: - What’s going on with the move to Vancouver? - Tell me more about the marketing methods you are using with your current business… Vancouver When I’m not being a traveler, Canada is home. For the past five years Montreal was my base. I went there to buy an investment property because it’s 40% cheaper than Toronto and Vancouver. To make a long story short, I got there, purchased a triplex (three unit building), then decided to stay, got into a relationship with a lovely Montreal lady, which then ended last year. I decided Vancouver, where I have more friends and community (and let’s face it - the best weather for Canada despite the rain), was where I wanted to be in 2024. So I packed up my Tesla with some of my stuff, went briefly to Toronto for the holiday break to see my aunt, uncle and cousins there, put my car on a train to Vancouver, then caught a plane over. Remote Work/Digital Nomad I’ve been running some kind of digital business for so long that I forget sometimes that most of the world work in jobs that require they stay in one city. Needless to say, when I move around, whether that’s between Canadian cities, or during trips overseas, my business and tasks don’t change. I’m head of marketing and sales at [InboxDone.com](. This means that I’m almost entirely responsible for attracting potential customers, and doing sales calls to get them to sign up. I do have a sales support team that helps with followup communication, but I run the ads and do the sales calls, plus a little bit of followup via LinkedIn messages. We’ve run many other marketing experiments in the past, most of which you can find documented in this blog post - [Here’s A List Of The Marketing Tactics I’ve Used To Grow All My Companies](. There’s a lot of lessons from the past six years I’ve lived this role, many of which were quite new for me compared to the previous 15 years running my content and teaching business. However, there is one thing that hasn’t changed, which I continue to use for all my businesses… The Core Metric I like things to be as simple as possible. The more variables, the more difficult it is for me to believe my metrics because there are too many elements at play. This is why I’ve always had a core metric when it comes to assessing the health of my business, in particular for judging growth, or really expected future growth. You might think this metric is obvious — number of product sales, or new client signups. But no, sales are actually a by-product of the core metric. For my blog/teaching business, my core metric was daily new email subscribers. During the peak of that business I was getting 100-200 new signups a day almost entirely from organic search, boosted by affiliates during launches (to as much as 1,400 a day!). As long as this core metric sustained that level, I could rely on making a similar amount of money every month. If I wanted to grow my business, growing that core metric number had the biggest impact. However, around 2015, the core metric started to drop. It continued to drop year after year. This is why I knew the business was dying. I did continue to make sales even as it dropped. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in fact, largely using my newsletter. BUT, that newsletter was shrinking, not growing anymore because I was getting fewer new subscribers than unsubscribes/unresponsive emails. I was not happy about this of course, but I knew why. I was no longer focused on the business, not working to get new incoming links, not publishing as many blog posts or podcasts, not creating new marketing campaigns with big content drops. My focus had turned to [InboxDone.com](, which in turn led me to focus on a new core metric. For my current business, our core metric is discovery calls booked (sales calls). Since we are not an email marketing driven business, unlike my coaching business, I don’t look at email opt-ins as an important number. Most days I review our paid ad campaigns and use what I learn from sales calls to help calibrate the campaigns. The more sales calls booked each week, the more sales. Other elements play a part. Conversion rate, the ratio of new client sign ups to sales calls, is important. Adspend (ROAS - return on advertising spend) for paid ads, where the sales calls come from, etc, are all critical elements. Yet if I want to look at one number to get a sense of where we are heading, I look at the number of calls booked in the calendar. If I want to grow the business, I need to book more calls. What Is Your Core Metric? I’ll end this newsletter with a simple question for you… What is your core metric? If there is one number you can look at to judge the health of your business, what is it? This number should be a trigger that leads to a sale, not the sale itself. If you just look at sales, it’s hard to predict future results. If you don’t have this number, chances are you either have very little revenue, or very sporadic and unpredictable revenue. Not being sure of your core metrics also means you probably don’t work on your marketing enough. If you’re not doing something to bring in new sales every day, you don’t have metrics to look at. Keep up the marketing! Yaro yaro@yaro.blog [yaro.blog]( [fb]( [tw]( [ig]( [in]( Update your email preferences or unsubscribe [here]( © 2024 Blog Mastermind Ltd 330 Avro Ave Pointe-Claire, QC H9R 5W5, Canada [[beehiiv logo]Powered by beehiiv](