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One of the biggest tragedies I’ve seen in business is a business owner who spends significant time and effort generating leads, but then doesn’t act on them in a logical, methodical and repeatable way, to convert those leads into paying customers.
Often, these leads are represented by a stack of business cards collected through networking activities that have not been added to a customer database or who haven’t been followed up on. If that’s you, no need to raise your hand. But it is time to get out of the trap and start turning those leads into paying customers.
To make improvements in this area, you simply have to start doing one thing; measure your current conversion success rate. Most business owners have no clue what their conversion rate is. Once you start measuring, you realize what you should be doing and your results begin to improve.
In addition, a specific, focused approach to handling leads can significantly improve your conversion rate. One of the greatest advantages to this approach for generating new business is that it often costs very little as the leads have already been acquired.
Write down the specific steps that you take potential customers through to get them familiar with your business. Each business has a different set of steps in their selling process. The number of steps often correlates to the value of the product or service being sold. You must decide how familiar a new prospect needs to be with your business in order to make a purchase. If it is a complicated product or service, you will likely need more steps in your selling process.
Once you have your current process steps written down, you need to assess if everyone in your business is using the same approach. If not, why not? It is easier to implement, test and measure new approaches if you first start with standardisation.
I often hear business owners say they would lose their best sales person if they made them follow a standard sales process. But this gives sales people too much responsibility and authority in your business. You carry the risks of the business and set its expectations and limitations. Don't let the personal preferences of others dictate how you will run your business.
Once you have assessed your current standard, establish your specific selling process steps, train your team to follow the selling process, support it with the necessary materials, and measure the results of each specific step. Make changes to your sales process based on the results of your measurements. Test and measure. Test and measure. Again and again. Make incremental improvements and hold yourself and your team accountable for the results.
As you build your step-by-step sales process, be mindful that in every process there is a point where your prospect will engage in a physical action to indicate they are ready to buy. If you can identify that “physical action” for your business, then investing your efforts to make that happen will improve your conversion rate.
One of my clients has a 100-person catamaran on a local lake where he hosts corporate events, private parties and weddings. The physical action that has the most success for turning leads into actual customers is to get them to step foot on his boat. Often, once they’ve done that, they sign a contract. What is your "get on the boat" moment?
* Harry Welby-Cooke is a leading business and executive coach and South Africa’s master licensee for global franchise company ActionCoach. For more information, visit www.actioncoachsa.co.za.
