Improve your selling efficiency the easy way

When budgets get tight, the fastest way to grow business revenue is to improve sales conversion ratios. You do the sums. We are often are called in by companies that are short of cash because their sales have dropped below budget, and the way the economy is signposted, we will not be short of work!

In these situations there is often fierce competition between the need to reduce spending (payroll/headcount/“anything we can”) and the need to invest in future sales. Sound familiar?

And the answer is… “Yes, both can be achieved!” Not by everyone working harder (in these situations, in our experience, everyone is working as hard as they can), rather by working smarter and more efficiently, by closing a higher proportion of sales. A good starting position is to be counting these numbers in the first place. If you are not counting your sales conversion ratio, the chances are that you will be generating a lot of activity, much of it with prospects who are not particularly serious about buying.

The easiest way to increase sales conversion is to more precisely qualify your sales prospects. If you, or your sales team, are investing time, effort, and money, pursuing a sales “prospect”, doesn’t it make sense before you go to all that effort, to check how much of a prospect they really are? For sure this will make it harder to set appointments, though wouldn’t you rather invest in prospects that really can go the distance? Double-check your reward strategy so that you are not providing incentives for random appointment setting, without setting some qualitative criteria to maintain the standard.

If it becomes hard to make appointments / progress sales, assess how much buyers motivation you are creating with your prospects early on in your sales process. Remember that you need to communicate benefits from your prospects perspective, and avoid technical features of your products.

We’ve just posted a checklist of qualifying questions on our Tips page that you, or your sales team, can use to ensure that your are moving your sales process forward with prospects that can actually go the distance. Try using these and watch your sales conversion rate shoot up.