Sales Conversion Optimisation

Simply put, there are three ways to increase sales in a "real world" business:

1) Pump more leads in the top of the funnel

2) Improve your sales skills / conversion rate

3) Improve the efficiency of your sales process

See, the internet is full of all these "internet marketers" and (fly-by-night) "advertising agencies" promising you the world. But the trouble is, they're all coming from a place where all you need is the funnel, the lead... and you don't have to spend any energy or time converting, let alone delivering them. That works fine for selling $997 information products off the back of a webinar, but it doesn't work fine for "real" businesses. More leads just equals more sales time. And the biggest problem? Those leads are often crap.

If you even get them. So many agencies promise the world and then... well, you're not still using the same agency from 3 months ago, are you? 'Nuff said.

See real-world (non-internet) businesses are different. It's not just a "numbers game" as so many believe. It's a quality and an efficiency game. If you have to have a phone call, possibly an in-person meeting, create a proposal, follow-up... how much time does that take? An hour? Two? Five?

In my old business, it was often up to 10 (custom technology solutions). That was worth doing when the leads came in via referral, as I had a very high close rate on those. But cold traffic? That nearly sent me bankrupt - not from a lack of leads, but from the costs of servicing them. If you're in architecture or software development and do at-risk "spec work", those costs are even higher.

And how many of those convert? Historically you may have even converted over 50%, depending on your lead source and industry (referrals often fit this bucket)... but these new cold internet leads? Lower.

All that effort... not much more in sales.

Or maybe you've tried a sales coach, but chances are you've already done that before, or have hired seasoned pros, so the gains to be had are minimal there too. Or a 5 or 10% uplift just isn't going to be that significant to your bottom line. Good, but not game-changing.

So what's left? You can improve the efficiency of your sales process, often drastically.

This is where all the opportunity we found this week lies - improving the efficiency of what's already there. $1M. Recurring. Just from efficiency improvements.

And the beauty of doing that? Once you have a beautifully efficient engine tuned and humming along nicely, THEN you can amp up the leadgen tap and actually expect it to work, without crippling your sales team, lowering your lead quality, or bringing on annoying clients you regret.

See there are 5 critical components to a successful sales conversion engine:

1. Filtration - the system must filter out the wrong prospects - the tyre-kickers, the overly price-sensitive - and attract the right ones

2. Loss Prevention - chances are, your existing sales process (funnel) is leaky. People hit your website, never to return. People fill in a contact form or quote request, then ghost you. People don't return your calls. Proposals/Quotes are never answered. People don't make the promised deposits/payments. All of these are holes in your funnel that can be plugged, not 100%, but we often see 10x improvements just from this one area, especially at the top of the funnel (if you don't have retargeting in place, you're probably in this bucket)

3. Pareto Outreach - The Pareto Principle is otherwise known as the 80/20 rule. When you have people doing sales outreach, you MUST focus on the 20% of the work likely to lead to 80% of the result, or your salespeople will get at best just get stuck, or at worst outright fail. You need your salespeople focused on JUST the right prospects.

4. Leveraged indoctrination and follow-up: See the problem with cold leads in particular, is they don't know who you are, what you do or why you stand out, certainly not well enough. And then they don't like or trust you either. That's why these people take so much longer to convert, and convert at lower percentages. You need to warm them up. Now there are two ways of doing that - consuming your salesperson's time, or building an automated indoctrination sequence to warm them up before they ever even speak to a salesperson. Which do you think is more efficient?

5. End-to-End Measurement: You have to be able to measure everything from ad through to sale. Every single step. If you can't do that, you don't know exactly what's working and hence, what to cut and what to double down-on. You can guess, but those guesses are often wrong.

To build a sales conversion engine, you need technology and automation. It can't be done manually. Such a system doesn't replace your sales team, it augments them, makes them more efficient.

So bouncing back to our $1M opportunity week. How is that possible?

Simply from all the money left on the table as a result of not implementing those 4 things. Every single one of them is currently:

1. Servicing anyone and anyone who requests the sales team's time

2. Operating incredibly leaky lead generation and conversion systems

3. Spending equal time following up EVERYONE, rather than the top 20% that will generate 80% of the results

4. Doing everything manually, without any leverage or automation.

If you have a salesperson/team or are spending more than 25% of your time on services-based sales, I encourage you to look towards your existing sales systems and processes and optimise those first, before adding more fuel to the fire and just overworking everyone.

I am David from Automate Your Business. If you need help implementing this - the combination of people, process & technology required to support streamlined communication SYSTEMS - then give me a call on  0404 027 748 or or email me at  david@automateyourbusiness.com.au.