Excellent marketing requires excellent metrics. That’s why it’s important to identify the source of every initial consultation. You’ve got to ask them how they found you. You can track everything if you try hard enough.

There are some great tools for measuring your marketing. Google Analytics, for example, is a great tool for measuring the effectiveness of your website.

But what about lunch? How do you measure the effectiveness of your referral source meetings? How do you know if you’re doing a good job helping other professionals make referrals to you?

You’ve got to carefully track your relationships with your referral sources. You need a record of every relationship and you need to track the clients generated by that relationship. You can do it with a simple spreadsheet or you can implement a relationship management system like Highrise or BatchBook.

Dig in to the stats as you gain data. Figure out where you’re winning and losing. Are you great at getting the referral source to send you business and weak at converting consults to clients? Are you wonderful at getting the referral sources to introduce you to other referral sources and poor at getting the referral sources to actually refer? You’ve got to dig in to find out where you’re succeeding and failing.

You can’t win the game if you don’t know the score. You need information in order to modify your strategy and tactics. Lunch, just like most other marketing activities, is measurable.

Take the data and use it to improve your weaknesses and capitalize on your strengths. Think of lunch as a game and keep improving. Set goals and work to meet them. The greater your understanding of the metrics the faster you’ll see improvement in your performance.