Imagine this scene. You have just spent the whole day walking up and down Auckland’s Queen Street trying to find those interested in learning more about your product or service. Most said no, but a few were keen to hear more. To these you handed a ticked to free show you had running at the Civic theatre, just up the road. You worked hard and by 3.00pm you had the placed full to capacity. All 2378 seats had an interested person sitting on them. This was looking good.

So come 3.01pm, the lights dim and the curtain rises. Show time. For just 15 minutes the crowd is treated to a interactive presentation on all things good about what you offer. You tell them everything new about what you do, customer videos are presented and a whole range of valuable tips imparted to help those buying for the first time.

You have their attention for the full 15 minutes as the content really hits the mark. The house lights come up and you stride onto the stage and thank everyone for coming. You close by telling group that your sales people are stationed by the exits ready to get the details of those interested in knowing more.

How many business cards would you expect your team to collect?

Now remember this is a qualified group of people. They said before that they were interested in learning more. And they had taken time out of their day to listen to what you had to say. And finally that your sales people weren’t there to take orders – just to collect their details so a conversation could happen later on.

So what would you expect?

100,250,50 or even a measly 10.

I don’t think that 10% wouldn’t be an unreasonable expectation. This would leave your team with a credible 240 prospects to follow up on. (And you with a feeling of some good work done, sore feet and a desperate need of a cup of tea and a sit down.)

But what if you only got 10, or say just 1.

Now that would be a completely different story. All that work, all those interested people and just 10 said yes. You would be left struggling with a whole host of questions. Did we bore them with the wrong message? Perhaps we don’t know our market? Or even, did I mumble my last instruction about cards by the exit rows? No doubt there would be a list of things to fix and a willingness to get them sorted asap.

Which is all very interesting especially when I expect the same result occurs each month to many websites in New Zealand with very little done to fix it.

It doesn’t take a lot to get to 2378 unique visitors each month. And of those that do very few would achieve anywhere near a 10% lead conversion rate. The difference being that a) those that do probably don’t have any analytics running off their website so they are blind to the numbers or b) they know the visitor counts and but for some reason they don’t relate this to a vision of what these figures represent.

For instance a website that attracts 6000 unique visitors seem an OK busy sort of website. That is until you sit in a packed Aotea Centre and realise that this count relates to the amount of people around you – multiplied by three. Or how about you visit Westpac stadium in Wellington on a rugby sevens event when it is also full to the brim. Think of this amount of people times two and you have a close count to the 75k of unique visitors that most medium sized websites receive. And finally my current favourite – a client website that brings in the population of Dunedin each and every month – yep around 115,000 unique.

So job #1 should be to translate these analytics figures into real world counts. Think in terms of packed nights at the Aotea Centre or Eden Park Stadiums filled with your website visitors. Then I want you to do something very simple.

Expect more from this group.

Just as you would feel distraught after presenting to 2378 people and receiving only 10 leads. Ask big searching questions like those I offered at the start. Does our website show that we know our market? Are we presenting what they are looking for? What can we do to turn the 10 into the 240 it should be?