Thanksgiving is over and Black Friday is a day of the past. That means the Holiday Season is upon us! Or, as some say, cuffing season; to DJs it’s something more serious: engagement season! Is it the time spent indoors due to cold weather, the Christmas spirit, or the heart-shaped boxes of candy on Valentine’s Day? Does all the time spent with family at the holidays invigorate our inherent nesting instinct? Who’s to say? Whatever the cause, something happens between Thanksgiving and the end of February that leads to more wedding proposals, and subsequent “Yes!” responses in return, in that span of time than at any other time of the year.
For DJs, at least those who are in it for the big bucks, engagement season means a steady stream of inquiries from recently engaged couples seeking a DJ For their upcoming wedding day celebration. Hopefully you have a sales pitch ready for these couples, and no doubt you are a master at converting leads to sales. If not, stick around, and in a future post I will offer some helpful advice in that regard, but today I want to address something else.
Are you tracking the source of all your leads?
This is an oft-overlooked, but very important piece of data to track! If you are paying for leads, you not only want to know how many leads are coming from a given source, but how they are performing. This means it isn’t good enough to simply note how a potential client found you. No, you need to track that lead through every stage of its life. Here’s how I do that.
When someone reaches out to me, I create an entry in a database I’ve created for managing my DJ business. You can do the same, or use a simple spreadsheet. You want to track the following information:
1. The date they first contacted you
2. The date of the event
3. The source of the lead, i.e. where they found you. Google? Instagram? The Knot? A referral? They saw you in person and liked you? Usually it’s obvious. If they send a DM on Instagram, there’s your answer. Other times, as in a direct email, you need to ask.
4. The current status of the lead. I have six options here: Open, Booked, Date Taken, Not Hired, Spam, and DOA. The last one, DOA, describes a lead that never responded to any replies from me. Date taken means I was already booked on their date.
For events that are booked, I track how much I charged, what my costs were, and how much, if any, tip was given. This allows me to track to the penny how much I make on average per event from a given lead source.
From that info I create a report that tells me precisely how each lead source is doing. I want to know how much total income leads from each source are generating, as well as how much per gig. If I make $5,000 from people who find me on Google, but worked 10 gigs to make that, perhaps that is better than making only $2,000 from Instagram, but working just 2 gigs for it. There’s no definite answer there. $500 each for 10 gigs has merit, as does $1,000 each from two gigs. Either way, you need to know this, so you know where to focus your efforts, because clearly you want 10 gigs from Instagram, and the resulting $10,000, more than you want 10 more from Google, right??
I also track what percentage of gigs from a given lead end up DOA. This matters, especially if you are paying for leads. If you’re spending $10 per lead, and 80% are dead from the get-go, you may want to reconsider buying more from that source. Unless, however, the other 20% are booking and paying you well. Unless you are tracking all of the above, you’ll never know, and you will be relying on hunches and guesses instead of cold, hard, data.
If you want more detail, or some screenshots of my database in action, comment on one our social media channels. And in the meantime, don’t forget to ask everyone who contacts you, “how did you find me?”