Less Leads, More Sales
Want to double your sales? Who wouldn’t? But how?
Conventional thinking suggests one way to accomplish this is to create lead generation strategies that produce twice as many leads. You could hire more sales help, expand your presence through more adverting, trade shows, seminars, client appreciation events, networking and referral campaigns.
Conventional thinking would be correct. All these activities will result in proportional increase in leads. They will also result in proportional increases in expenses, cash outlays, time and effort. And as a business owner, this is definitely not for you.
As a business owner, you want a better return. You want to increase sales without the need for additional expenses and cash outlays. You want this new sales growth to drop right to your bottom line, don’t you?
I’m a big believer in analogies as they can be entertaining, provocative and a powerful way to reinforce a belief to drive home a point, so here it goes...
Your sales efforts and the corresponding results are like the yields on a savings bond.
With savings bonds, a slightly better interest rate and the magic of compounded interest can dramatically affect your yields. The same holds true for your sales process.
This hypothesis is based on the built in ratios inherent in your current sales cycle and the time required to move your opportunities through each of the various stages of your sales process.
Below is a typical example of the various stages and corresponding ratios of the activity required to produce a sale.
- 100 calls required to secure 10 appointments
- 10 appointments required to generate 3 proposals
- 3 proposals required to win a sale
Your business has its own nuances regarding the particular stages a sales opportunity must travel through as it’s promoted from a lead to a close. Of equal importance is the time it takes for it to progress from one stage to the next. Like compounded interest, an incremental improvement in each of these areas can yield a tremendous return.
The more profitable way to increase your sales and expend less energy, cash and the typical resources required to generate more leads is too focus on the metrics of your current sales process, ratios and time cycles. As with savings bonds, a slightly elevated interest rate and the magic of compounding can have a dramatic effect on your yields.
But it gets even better, unlike a savings bond, where interest only compounds annually, your sales cycle has multiple compounding opportunities within any given year. That’s right, you have the ability to lever the magic of compounding interest as often as you want at a time and a place of your choosing. What would happen if you could:
- Increase the possibilities of a lead successfully being promoted from one stage of your sales cycle to the next
- Shorten the time it takes for a lead to travel from one stage of your sales cycle to the next
No one would argue that setting a goal of a 15% improvement in any area of activity is an unreasonable goal. Extend your one hour workout an extra nine minutes. Cut out a snack or desert each day. Reduce a 20 minute phone conversation by three minutes, get the picture? Now lets apply the 15% rule to your sales process.
Suppose you adapted a technique or strategy that would encourage your prospects to want to move through each one of your sales stages with 15% more effectiveness. If you could achieve this incremental improvement in each of the three sales stages mentioned, you would enjoy a 52% increase in sales, without an additional lead.
Now suppose you could come up with a process that would reduce by 15%, the time an opportunity stays lingering in each sales stage. That 52% of new sales increase would amount to a whopping 75% rate of return again with no new leads.
WOW, an annual sales increase of 75%, without a single new lead and / or the expense and distractions of additional trade show, seminar and / or added staff.
Here is The Productive Entrepreneur’s challenge for you.
Rather than focus on more lead generation activity to increase your sales, first analyze and tweak your current sales processes. Look for opportunities to optimize efficiencies the various touch points discussed.
Brainstorm with others and / or investigate some of the creative strategies that others have successfully incorporated into their sales processes. Evaluate if they can return compounded interest into your sales process with slight modifications.
I can tell you from personal experience in my various business ventures, that it is possible to achieve even grater compounding rates of return. I have personally reduced sales cycle times by over 40% as well as improved lead to closing ratios by many fold.
As a fellow entrepreneur and sales aficionado, I want to share with you what has worked for me. This is the first of a ten part series, I will elaborate on some simple and proven strategies and techniques that can be adapted into any sales process for superior results.
