When we are doing Vtiger consulting, we get a lot of questions about tracking marketing expenditures and calculating ROI. We also get a lot of questions about sealing the leaks in the sales funnel but I will cover that in a later post.
Using Vtiger to calculate ROI of your marketing investment is surprisingly simple. Here are the steps
- Add a field to your web form “How Did You Hear About Us?”
- Connect your webform to Vtiger. Boru can help with this if the vtiger webform tool doesn’t do the trick (as is the case for most users)
- Make the lead source field mandatory so, if leads are imported or come in via phone you will capture the lead source there too.
- Make sure the source field maps to Organizations for lead conversions
- Do your quotes in Vtiger. Link the quotes to the Org. That should be standard for you already.
- Convert the successful quotes to invoices (or to Sales Orders and then Invoices). As a side note: you can sync the invoices to Quickbooks.
- Run a Sales report and the end of each quarter and the end of the year. Output a line for each invoice and be sure to include the Lead Source field. Export the report to excel. Use a pivot table, etc, to get a total Sales by source. Note Vtiger 7 (as observed in Vtiger on demand) has pivot tables built in to the report tool now.
- Go to your Quickbooks and run an expense report for the same period. Grab the total expense for each lead source.
- Calculate the ROI for each Lead Source = (Sales-Cost)/Cost.
- Once you have your calculations you should be able to make good decisions on how to invest your marketing budget gong forward.
Here is an excel tutorial if you want to know how to do it in excel. You will see it is pretty easy.
