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September 28, 2023 • 16 mins
In this episode of the "Work From Your Happy Place" podcast, host Belinda Ellsworth discusses the importance of tracking numbers and implementing systems in a business. She emphasizes that tracking numbers is like having a personal coach that provides valuable information to adjust behaviors and improve performance. Belinda provides examples of what numbers to track, such as social media growth, sales, and advertising metrics. She shares personal experiences and highlights the significance of tracking numbers to make informed decisions, identify trends, and adjust strategies. Belinda concludes by encouraging listeners to consistently track numbers to avoid falling behind in their business journey.

Key Learnings from the Episode:

[00:01:19] The Importance of Tracking Numbers
[00:02:38] Tracking Social Media Growth
[00:04:08] Tracking Sales and Ad Performance
[00:12:30]The importance of tracking numbers
[00:13:38] Embracing technology
[00:14:49]The things you should be tracking

About the Host -
Belinda Ellsworth is a Speaker, Trainer, Best-Selling Author, and Podcaster
She has been a professional speaker, mover, and shaker for more than 25 years. Having built three successful companies, she has helped thousands of entrepreneurs make better decisions, create successful systems, and build business strategies using her "Four Pillars of Success" system.
Belinda has always had a passion and zest for life with the skill for turning dreams into reality.

How to Connect with Belinda:
Facebook -https://www.facebook.com/workfromyourhappyplace LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/belindaellsworth Instagram -https://www.instagram.com/workfromyourhappyplace/ Website - www.workfromyourhappyplace.com

Join my membership program and discover the art of creating and sharing amazing experiences with like-minded people, all from the comfort of your own home. You get to connect with others online, learn new skills and techniques, and grow your network without ever having to leave your computer screen. To know more, click on the link https://workfromyourhappyplace.com/vip/
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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Work from your Happy Plays, the podcast that equips you with a
knowledge and inspiration to live your dreamsand find your own happy plays. You
will be encouraged by and learn fromentrepreneurs and artists who are already working from
their happy plays, all while pursuingtheir passion with a purpose. Be sure

(00:20):
to sign up for our free weeklynewsletter for our recap of the week's guests
and a preview of what's in store. We also have two special gifts for
you, a video, the fiveor Principles to Living a half year Life
and a printable download title Top tensales Strategies. Go to work for your
happy place dot com, forward slashfree. Fill out the attached form to

(00:43):
receive your gifts and be added toour newsletter. And now here's your host,
be Linda Ellsworth. Hello everyone,and welcome back to our Tuesday Tip.
I'm your host, b Linda Ellsworth, and I'm really excited to be
continuing our top ten mistakes that peoplemake and running a business. Now.
Today is number five and the waythat we've broken these down is the top

(01:08):
five are really if you're starting abusiness or maybe you're in the throes of
it, and maybe you've launched,it's not going exactly like you wanted,
and you really need some help inknowing what's really important now. These top
ten are mistakes that people make evenwhen they've been running a business for thirty

(01:29):
years, like myself, because sometimesyou lose sight of them, right.
But these top five are super importantif you are just starting a business as
well as if you're continuing to runa business. And then six through ten
are going to be more about yourongoing success and things that are going to
be important for you. And todayis number five, and today might be

(01:53):
like one of my favorites. Andthe reason it's one of my favorites to
talk about is because it's the onethat I find that hardly anyone does.
And a lot of people think whenthey're new that it's not important for them
to do. They think that thisis something that a seasoned business needs to
do. And I will say toyou that it is very important for a

(02:15):
seasoned business to do. But thebiggest mistake that you can make in starting
a business is not having any systemimplemented and tracking your numbers, because tracking
your numbers is like having your ownlittle personal coat sitting on your shoulder telling

(02:35):
you information, information that can causeyou to adjust your behaviors. Now,
I'm going to give you some differentexamples of this in things that you should
be tracking. But it is soimportant and a lot of people just go
along and they have no tracking system, They don't even pay attention to any

(03:01):
of their numbers at all, andthey get themselves into trouble. Now,
what are some things that you shouldbe tracking. Well, if you are
trying to really grow social media platforms, whether that's one to three or even
four, whatever it is you're tryingto grow, you need to track it

(03:21):
like on a weekly basis, sothat you can see, well, how
much do we grow this week?How much did we grow between this week
and this week? You can lookthat over at a series of months.
And why this is important is becausewhen you are tracking it and you say,
gosh, we only gained three newfollowers this week, but then in

(03:45):
another week you gained fifty new followers. Well, then you have to ask
yourself what was I doing that week? What did we post, what got
engagement? What was I doing?And I can tell you most of the
time, it's things like me commentingon other people's posts or comments or responding.

(04:08):
It is when I'm going in andinviting people that have made a comment.
Especially on Facebook, you can invitepeople then to follow you on your
page. You can do that onLinkedIn as well. And if you're not
sending that out and if you're notparticipating in other people's post, you're not

(04:28):
going to get as much engagement orgrow as quickly. But sometimes you get
busy and you totally forget that youneed to be doing this, or you
think in your mind that you are. But when you look at your numbers
and you're like, oh, mygosh, we lost three people this week.
What did we do well? Wewent five days and didn't even post.
I mean, there are things thatyou can then look at and say,

(04:51):
what's going on, Oh, wekind of have fallen short here.
So that's one number that you wantto track. Also want to track your
sales, so if you don't knowwhat you're selling on a daily basis,
especially when you're launching, or evenon a weekly basis. I always set

(05:11):
a goal for the month, andthen I break that down to weekly,
and then I break it down todaily because then it doesn't get away from
me because then at the end ofthe month, I'm not like, oh
my gosh, we're so far off. I can tell within five days that
we're off, we're ahead, andthen I can see wow, that is
making a difference, or wow,I am falling short. We've gone five

(05:33):
days now without getting any sales atall. There is a problem. The
other thing that you want to trackis if you are running social media ads,
then you should be tracking your spendingper day. You should be tracking
your reach, You should be trackingyour views and how many people are visiting

(05:54):
your sales page. So recently wewere running ads and I saw that fifteen
hundred people had visited our sales pageand yet not one single person had made
a purchase. Well that's a horribleconversion rate, right, But what if
I wasn't looking at it. Iwould have just continued to go and spend
money and then be disappointed because Ispent all this money and I didn't get

(06:18):
a result. But I saw afterseven days that fifteen hundred and sixty eight
people had visited our site, visitedour sales page, and not made a
purchase. So what does that sayto me? That says to me that
the sales page is confusing? Possibly, you know, because the first thing

(06:42):
you ought have to look at isit out of people's price range? Is
it just too much money? Idon't think so, I've done my market
research on that. Right. Sothen it's like, well, is it
confusing? Are they unclear about howto purchase or what to purchase or what
it is you're even selling? Arewhat pain point is it that you're trying
to serve or deliver? Right?So when I went back and looked at

(07:05):
it through that, I not onlydid I look at it because it's hard
sometimes for you to be objective,but I asked ten people that I respect,
and I said, hey, andI not just that I respect,
but like ten people that I knowI could go to. And I didn't
just pick people like in business orthat I've been in business for a long

(07:28):
time. I picked ten different peoplein ten different age brackets, in ten
different income brackets. Like I wentand picked twenty one year old that's barely
making just a small amount of moneyto somebody else who is making a ton
of money. Like I said,Okay, let's go with these different ages,

(07:50):
let's go with these different income brackets, and then let's see what kind
of feedback do I get? Sure? Enough. It was like, I
don't understand exactly what you're offering.And to me it made complete sense.
Why because I've looked at it forfive months? So I said, okay,

(08:15):
I took all of their notes,I took it back to the drawing
table, and we redid that entiresales page in like three days. I
stopped the ads, didn't run anyads until we got it right. Until
I also identified, which I talkedabout in session three, is knowing your
target audience and customer. So wewent back to that. We got language

(08:39):
around who that customer is, andwe started seeing results. This is tracking
your numbers. It's your little coachthat sits on your shoulder and says,
hey, something you were doing beforeis working, and now you're not doing
and something's off or this is notconverting. Something must be wrong, or

(09:01):
whatever the case may be. Ifyou're not getting the sales you want,
you want to change quickly before itgets ahead of you. And then you're
running out of money and you haveno sales. And what also happens in
that is you start to become deflated. You start to think, oh,
this business isn't going to work.Now it will work if you get the

(09:22):
right things working in it. Andif you have no clue, if you
haven't tracked any numbers, then it'sgoing to be hard for you to know
where do I make the adjustments,Where do I make the fixes? So
my friends find the things that aregoing to be important for you to track.

(09:43):
When I'm selling my planner, Itrack sales on those planners every day.
I compare to where they were thistime last year. When I see
that last year we had a reallybig bump on this day, I go
back to last year's campaign and say, what were we doing? Oh,

(10:05):
we did this, let's do thatagain. So when you've been in business
for a while and you're tracking yournumbers and you're comparing them to last year's
at the exact same time, becausedifferent months have different behavior, right,
so I'm able to see quickly,Wow, we're down over launch day.

(10:28):
Last year we were so three yearsago our launch day was okay. The
next year our launch date was likedoubled, and then last year our launch
day wasn't as low as the firstone of two years ago, right,
but it wasn't doubled. So it'slike, Okay, where did it land?
What did we or did we notdo so then you say, oh

(10:52):
my gosh, okay, I needto go do that again. I keep
track of those because it's in avery short window of time that we're actually
selling that. Because I have tomake the most of that time September,
October, November, December. Ihave to be very clear and on top
of it, and so I trackthose numbers daily and then I continue to

(11:16):
track them monthly as that season continueson at what times did we discount the
product, did we put it onsale? Like? These are things that
we track with the numbers, andwe do it in comparison to the two
years before. So this is animportant thing that I think helps you determine

(11:41):
your strategies, your behaviors, yourmarketing, all of the above. If
you're clueless and you have no ideawhat you did before. If you're clueless
and have no idea what was workingand now it's not, if you're not
tracking anything, then you could veryeasily your business start to sort of fall

(12:01):
down or start to not have asgood as sales. And it could be
simply in something that you were doingconsistently before and now you've just quit doing
because either a you got out ofthe habit be you thought you didn't need
to. Oftentimes, people work reallyreally hard when they're first launching a business,
and then as it gets going,they're feeling pretty good and they get

(12:22):
a little bit laxadaisical about things,and then they get surprised when their sales
start to falter, and then theysay, I don't even know why.
Well, you gotta go back andlook at what were we doing before.
And if you haven't tracked anything,if you keep no numbers, it's going
to be very difficult to figure thatout. I am a numbers girl.

(12:46):
I always have been. I lovenumbers, I love following them, I
love tracking them. I know I'munique in that, especially with women.
And when I'm coaching women, thenumber one thing I hear is, oh,
I'm not a numbers person at all. Well you need to be,
so quit saying that you're not,and say, I know I need to

(13:09):
work on this. This might notbe my strong suit, but I can
become good at this. I canlearn some basic skills in this. Forever
I said, oh, technology isnot my friend, Well I've quit saying
that why, because it needs tobe. I might not be as proficient
as someone else, and I willstill hire people to do technology around me

(13:33):
because I don't want to learn everything, and I want to learn coding.
I don't want to learn all thereis to learn about technology, but I
need to have a grasp of basictechnology to even participate in today's marketing world,
right like you have to have someconcept of it. So I quit

(13:56):
saying technology is not my friend.I struggle with technology. Instead I say
I am learning, I am gettingbetter, I am embracing technology. The
more I say this to myself everyday, guess what, it has gotten
easier. So my friends, don'tclaim that you are not a numbers person,

(14:16):
because you need to be. Ifyou want to have a successful business,
if you want to continue to grow, you need to be watching your
numbers and gosh, it is yourown little personal coach that talks to you
if you're watching and you're listening.So that is our Tuesday tip for this

(14:37):
week. Sit down and figure outthe things you should be tracking. Because
for different people, depending on yourbusiness, it's going to be different,
but probably social media is going tobe important. Sales are going to be
important. Maybe the number of callsthat you make if you know you have
a certain clothes rate like I madeX amount of calls and I got X

(15:01):
amount of sales. Then you'd simplyfigure, Okay, I can see my
ratio. Now did I make thismany calls? Have I made this many
calls today? It's an easy thingto track and then you can see,
wow, I've gotten lax. Ineed to get back on it. So
thanks everyone for tuning in today.Appreciate you so much. I hope you're

(15:22):
finding this helpful. If you are, please do a rate or review if
you're enjoying it, and please sharethis with a friend. That is how
we continue to grow here. That'show you can show your appreciation for all
that you are learning. And Ijust want you to know that I know
you have choices of where to spendyour time, and I'm so thankful that

(15:43):
you're choosing to spend it with ushere at work from your happy place.
Make sure you follow our subscribe soyou don't miss a single one of our
great interviews. I do these TuesdayTips. They're short, sweet and simple
on Tuesdays, but we interview entrepreneursand those lands on Monday days, and
then we interview artists who really that'sthat right brain, left brain They both

(16:04):
come from different skill sets, soyou get to learn from both. So
we hope that you'll tune into thoseinterviews as they are amazing. Thanks so
much everyone, and we'll see younext time on work from your happy place.
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