Bob Cefail on the sales pipeline
So you want a thriving successful business.
You want customers and money pouring in the door.
You want an abundance of new sales leads and deals coming in.
This goes to the heart of marketing and I am going to share with you one of the biggest secrets in having a successful business.
First of all, marketing is not sales. Most business owners think marketing IS sales. It is true that successful marketing will result in sales, but marketing and sales are quite different. Marketing is a big subject, there are thousands of books written about it, and covering the whole subject is beyond the scope of this article, but in the time I have here I CAN share one golden secret guaranteed to blow the roof off of your sales if you do this right. Fair enough?
Whether you have 200 salespeople in your company, or if you are the only one, there is a principle that you can apply to increase the efficiency of your sales and marketing process, and increase your profits. It works like this. To understand it, we have to work backwords from a completed sale and look at the 4 major hurdles you have. These are going to be what you are going to measure.
Before you have a sale, you have to have a qualified prospect. Before you have the qualified prospect, you have to have separated out that prospect from a few that for whatever reason, weren’t really qualified, either financially or because what you have to offer just isn’t right for those people. Before those people came to you, they had to be a sales lead of some kind. Before they become a sales lead, they had to have seen some promo from you and responded, or they have to have responded to a free offer, a free download, some type of thing you offered to get them interested and start your sales process. And, importantly, they had to have read something that you had, a brocure, a website, a report, something that caused them to believe YOU might have the thing they were seeking. And before that you had to identify who this prospect is and what communication channels they might use in seeking help or information about someone like you, or you had to do some advertising somewhere. It also really, really, really helps to have done a survey of your target market so you know what it is that they expect before you make your offer or create your promotional piece.
But lets not get overly complex here. Lets just look at each part of the sales process and maximize each part. This is where the magic comes in. So in your promotion you spend x dollars by advertising in 3 different magazines, a few people call, a few of those turn into prospects, some are sent a sales proposal, and at the end of the pipeline, a few of them close and turn into money and pay you. Many business owners freak out if this cycle fails, and blame the advertising publication or medium because its the start of the whole pipeline, and this is not always the culprit.
In order to analyze and maximize this pipeline, here are a few key things you should do:
You must, must, must track every phone call that comes in, or every response of your website and ask this very important question to everyone; “how did you hear about us?”
Train your receptionist or answering service to do this with everyone. On the internet, this can be automated easily by software.
You can find out what website and what keyword or ad worked easily.
Note down for a month how many responses come in from each advertising source. Next note how many people were qualified buyers from each publication. Next note down of the qualified buyers, what percentage of them made it through the sales pipeline and turned into actual sales.
So we have 3 things you are measuring;
Raw initial response to your advertising
The relative quality of those responses
The number of qualified prospects you actually closed as a percentage
Now here is where the magic comes in. You don’t have to double your advertising budget to get double your sales. All you have to do is make each step 25% more efficient and you will have a huge increase. Lets look at this;
We advertise in 3 publications and get:
20 raw responses to advertising
10 qualified prospects
5 actual closes
Alright this is arbitrary but plausible
We then work on one thing at a time in the sales pipeline and just do this:
1) We make a better ad and get 25 responses instead of 20. A 25% increase. (You could also change the publication/advertising medium if it is really not working for you.) If you want to know if you have a good ad, call us at 727 465-0925 and we'll give you our opinion for free. How do you make a better ad? There's lots of ways, but for now, just try something you think will make the ad better after pretending you are a potential prospect and looking at your ad. Usually something stands out immediately that you can do.
2) We target the ad a little better with survey data, and drill the salespeople on how to qualify prospects correctly, and adjust the product line to make sure that we are really offering people what it is they said they wanted. We only get a 25% increase here, but we have 25 to start with, but we now have 12 or 13 qualified prospects.
3) We then drill the sales people on how to really sell, since there is no reason that we can’t get our closing ratio up from 50% to 75%, all other things being equal. In this step you might have to do a little competition research, and be clever in how you are going to sell your product and overcome sales objections etc, but with drilling of the salespeople this can be accomplished. There are always top salespeople that the other salespeople can learn from, and you can find free Bob Cefail tips on selling in Google Video and Youtube if you run out of ideas. Usually the top salesperson you can promote to a sales manager with a little incentive to help the others. If we can make just a 25% improvement here this means that we close 9 or 10 prospects, almost DOUBLE what we were doing before and spending the SAME amount on our advertising costs! One thing that is absolutely vital is SPEED of follow up. The number one failure we find is people are calling in, and they aren't gotten back to immediately, when they are hot. This will kill your sales pipeline and is easily remedied. With any of these things implemented, we can easily get our 25% increase.
4) After going through this process once, you may find that advertising in one publication over another makes a huge difference in the actual results you get. It might be that one publication, or website seems to send you much more qualified prospects, or one just flat out sends you more prospects that BUY. Are you tracking which responses come from which publication? You should be. With this data in hand, you can then put your advertising dollars into the thing that actually worked better with a bigger ad, more locations for the same size ad, similar publications, etc. and bingo you just boosted your results even more!
There are all kinds of other things we can do here to maximize these areas even further. Here are a couple more ideas:
-Offer something FREE to cast a wider net in your advertising. A free download, a free report, something tangible. A free consultation people pretty much smell as a sales pitch. Offer something tangible instead, that lets you capture their identity and follow up, but doesn’t obligate them.
-Do a survey so you can identify and test different advertising copy. Don’t be scared. Yes good market research from a qualified market research company is valuable and it isn’t cheap. But it does pay for itself many times over. And there are many types of things you can do that cost nothing, but get you valuable data to use in your marketing efforts. Look at your customers. Which 5 people paid you the most this year. Why did they go with you? How did they find your company? Why are they happy with you? Open your ears and you can find out a lot.
-Make sure that you get the name and email address of your customers, and people that get your “freebies” and send them tips and helpful information about the subject you are knowledgeable in. Don't bombard them with ads. Truly send them valuable information that will help them.
-Look at the key personnel in this sales pipeline and make sure that they are not turning away business. Actually call in to your own office from somewhere, or get a "secret shopper" person to do this, ask for their opinion about what happened and note down what you find. A sour receptionist or a poor salesperson will kill your results. Fix them or replace them.
There are a ton of other things you can do. For more information, call In Touch Media Group at 727 465-0925 and we'll look at your ad for free, and tell you what we think.
You want customers and money pouring in the door.
You want an abundance of new sales leads and deals coming in.
This goes to the heart of marketing and I am going to share with you one of the biggest secrets in having a successful business.
First of all, marketing is not sales. Most business owners think marketing IS sales. It is true that successful marketing will result in sales, but marketing and sales are quite different. Marketing is a big subject, there are thousands of books written about it, and covering the whole subject is beyond the scope of this article, but in the time I have here I CAN share one golden secret guaranteed to blow the roof off of your sales if you do this right. Fair enough?
Whether you have 200 salespeople in your company, or if you are the only one, there is a principle that you can apply to increase the efficiency of your sales and marketing process, and increase your profits. It works like this. To understand it, we have to work backwords from a completed sale and look at the 4 major hurdles you have. These are going to be what you are going to measure.
Before you have a sale, you have to have a qualified prospect. Before you have the qualified prospect, you have to have separated out that prospect from a few that for whatever reason, weren’t really qualified, either financially or because what you have to offer just isn’t right for those people. Before those people came to you, they had to be a sales lead of some kind. Before they become a sales lead, they had to have seen some promo from you and responded, or they have to have responded to a free offer, a free download, some type of thing you offered to get them interested and start your sales process. And, importantly, they had to have read something that you had, a brocure, a website, a report, something that caused them to believe YOU might have the thing they were seeking. And before that you had to identify who this prospect is and what communication channels they might use in seeking help or information about someone like you, or you had to do some advertising somewhere. It also really, really, really helps to have done a survey of your target market so you know what it is that they expect before you make your offer or create your promotional piece.
But lets not get overly complex here. Lets just look at each part of the sales process and maximize each part. This is where the magic comes in. So in your promotion you spend x dollars by advertising in 3 different magazines, a few people call, a few of those turn into prospects, some are sent a sales proposal, and at the end of the pipeline, a few of them close and turn into money and pay you. Many business owners freak out if this cycle fails, and blame the advertising publication or medium because its the start of the whole pipeline, and this is not always the culprit.
In order to analyze and maximize this pipeline, here are a few key things you should do:
You must, must, must track every phone call that comes in, or every response of your website and ask this very important question to everyone; “how did you hear about us?”
Train your receptionist or answering service to do this with everyone. On the internet, this can be automated easily by software.
You can find out what website and what keyword or ad worked easily.
Note down for a month how many responses come in from each advertising source. Next note how many people were qualified buyers from each publication. Next note down of the qualified buyers, what percentage of them made it through the sales pipeline and turned into actual sales.
So we have 3 things you are measuring;
Raw initial response to your advertising
The relative quality of those responses
The number of qualified prospects you actually closed as a percentage
Now here is where the magic comes in. You don’t have to double your advertising budget to get double your sales. All you have to do is make each step 25% more efficient and you will have a huge increase. Lets look at this;
We advertise in 3 publications and get:
20 raw responses to advertising
10 qualified prospects
5 actual closes
Alright this is arbitrary but plausible
We then work on one thing at a time in the sales pipeline and just do this:
1) We make a better ad and get 25 responses instead of 20. A 25% increase. (You could also change the publication/advertising medium if it is really not working for you.) If you want to know if you have a good ad, call us at 727 465-0925 and we'll give you our opinion for free. How do you make a better ad? There's lots of ways, but for now, just try something you think will make the ad better after pretending you are a potential prospect and looking at your ad. Usually something stands out immediately that you can do.
2) We target the ad a little better with survey data, and drill the salespeople on how to qualify prospects correctly, and adjust the product line to make sure that we are really offering people what it is they said they wanted. We only get a 25% increase here, but we have 25 to start with, but we now have 12 or 13 qualified prospects.
3) We then drill the sales people on how to really sell, since there is no reason that we can’t get our closing ratio up from 50% to 75%, all other things being equal. In this step you might have to do a little competition research, and be clever in how you are going to sell your product and overcome sales objections etc, but with drilling of the salespeople this can be accomplished. There are always top salespeople that the other salespeople can learn from, and you can find free Bob Cefail tips on selling in Google Video and Youtube if you run out of ideas. Usually the top salesperson you can promote to a sales manager with a little incentive to help the others. If we can make just a 25% improvement here this means that we close 9 or 10 prospects, almost DOUBLE what we were doing before and spending the SAME amount on our advertising costs! One thing that is absolutely vital is SPEED of follow up. The number one failure we find is people are calling in, and they aren't gotten back to immediately, when they are hot. This will kill your sales pipeline and is easily remedied. With any of these things implemented, we can easily get our 25% increase.
4) After going through this process once, you may find that advertising in one publication over another makes a huge difference in the actual results you get. It might be that one publication, or website seems to send you much more qualified prospects, or one just flat out sends you more prospects that BUY. Are you tracking which responses come from which publication? You should be. With this data in hand, you can then put your advertising dollars into the thing that actually worked better with a bigger ad, more locations for the same size ad, similar publications, etc. and bingo you just boosted your results even more!
There are all kinds of other things we can do here to maximize these areas even further. Here are a couple more ideas:
-Offer something FREE to cast a wider net in your advertising. A free download, a free report, something tangible. A free consultation people pretty much smell as a sales pitch. Offer something tangible instead, that lets you capture their identity and follow up, but doesn’t obligate them.
-Do a survey so you can identify and test different advertising copy. Don’t be scared. Yes good market research from a qualified market research company is valuable and it isn’t cheap. But it does pay for itself many times over. And there are many types of things you can do that cost nothing, but get you valuable data to use in your marketing efforts. Look at your customers. Which 5 people paid you the most this year. Why did they go with you? How did they find your company? Why are they happy with you? Open your ears and you can find out a lot.
-Make sure that you get the name and email address of your customers, and people that get your “freebies” and send them tips and helpful information about the subject you are knowledgeable in. Don't bombard them with ads. Truly send them valuable information that will help them.
-Look at the key personnel in this sales pipeline and make sure that they are not turning away business. Actually call in to your own office from somewhere, or get a "secret shopper" person to do this, ask for their opinion about what happened and note down what you find. A sour receptionist or a poor salesperson will kill your results. Fix them or replace them.
There are a ton of other things you can do. For more information, call In Touch Media Group at 727 465-0925 and we'll look at your ad for free, and tell you what we think.
posted by Bob Cefail | 11:05 AM
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