The four marketing numbers a Birmingham owner should know

Reporting has gotten worse even as tracking has gotten better. Owners get sent dozens of pages of charts and still can't answer the only question that matters: is this making us money? Here are the four numbers that answer it.

1. Cost per qualified lead

Not cost per click, not cost per form fill. Cost per lead your sales team would be glad to receive. The gap between those numbers is where most budgets quietly leak. Tracking it requires someone to mark leads as qualified or junk — which is a five-minute-a-week habit, not a software purchase.

2. Lead-to-customer close rate, by source

A source producing expensive leads that close at 40% often beats a source producing cheap leads that close at 4%. Without this number, you'll cut the wrong channel. Most businesses already have it sitting in their CRM or their scheduling software, unexamined.

3. Customer value

First-job revenue is the wrong figure for most Birmingham service businesses. If a customer stays three years or refers two neighbors, your allowable cost per acquisition is much higher than you think — and your competitors who only look at the first invoice will underbid themselves out of the market.

4. Calls, answered and missed

This one embarrasses more businesses than any other. Call tracking regularly reveals that a meaningful share of marketing-generated calls go unanswered, ring after hours with no voicemail, or get handed to someone who doesn't know a sales conversation is happening. Fixing the phone is usually the cheapest lead-generation project available.

What good reporting looks like

• One page you can read in two minutes, with those four numbers on it.
• Comparison to last month and last year, not just this month in isolation.
• A short written note explaining what changed and what happens next.
• Anything else available on request, not pushed at you monthly.

If you can't tell from your report whether to spend more or less next month, the report isn't finished.