Streamline your sales lead conversion process for management

How to create outlook signature

hello how are you doing today I'm fine and upbeat and hence it's a good day to talk about one of the most important sales metrics conversion percentage we all know how to measure conversion percentage in this video I'll tell you how to improve conversion percentage and to improve your conversion percentage your sales conversion you need to look at it a little differently not just start at the end but you'll have to look at conversion stage wise the traditional measure of sales conversion percentage is a number of leads received and the number of leads closed for example if you've received 100 leads and you've closed 10 your sales conversion is 10 however if you close only five the sales conversion is five percent so first thing you need to be aware of what is your sales conversion percentage each week each month and you need to be clearly monitoring the trend as well is it a declining Trend it's a flat or is it an improving Trend but yeah on this video I'll tell you how to look at stage wise conversion and how to identify Improvement opportunities for making the most of your marketing and sales expense so yes keep watching [Music] so let's get started as I said in this video I'll give you tips on how to measure conversion and how to improve your sales conversion so first let's look at the life cycle of a lead the life cycle of a lead starts from the contact stage where you receive a new lead a new customer contact it could be an inbound lead to social paid advertising website lead referrals exhibition or it could be an outbound business lead where you reach out to a prospective customer via a cold core or an email then you move to the qualifying stage where you qualify the new lead you call and meet the customer you understand the scope and decide whether it fits within your service portfolio or not and once you've qualified a lead if the lead is something that you should work upon if it qualifies and meets the criteria then you move on to the proposal stage where you create a proposal you want understand how much should you code for you define the entire scope of work and you submit a proposal and they may or may not be a negotiations page and then we have the final outcome where you either win the deal or you lose the deal and during any of these stages the lead may turn bold where the prospect or the contact stops responding so this is a very broad view of the life cycle of a lead moving from a contact being created the qualification phase proposal and negotiation and then finally you either win or you lose so if this is the lead cycle how is sales conversion measured so sales conversion is measured simply as number of leads one divided by the number of New Leads that you start working on so let's look at an example suppose if you receive 1 000 new leads and you close 50 successfully the new sales conversion is the number of deals one that is 50 divided by the number of New Leads that is one thousand so your conversion is five percent if you would have closed 75 your conversion would have been 7.5 percent it would have closed 100 then your conversion would have been 10 so now it brings us to the question is how do we improve sales conversion now what most businesses do is when they look at and when they decide okay that we need to improve our conversion so in this example let's say you want to improve your conversion from five percent to 7.5 percent so you look at the entire process as a whole but that makes it a little difficult what you should ideally do is you should look at stage wise lead movement so if we say that there are four stages new lead qualification proposal and closure understand the conversion at each stage understand the Dropout of leads at each stage because each stage would have its own Improvement opportunities for you which is simpler and easier compared to looking at the entire process as a whole so as I say consider stage wise lead movement so in the example earlier you received 1 000 new leads and eventually you closed 50. so how to make 50 75 or 100 now when you look at it as a whole it becomes a little cloudy a little difficult let's break it up so let's say in the example in the first stage moving from contact to qualification uh you find 400 leaves are not good fit for your business so they get dropped so either you make the call or the client does not move to the next stage so 600 60 percent move to the qualification phase so from there uh another 400 drop off and 200 move the proposal stage so from 1 000 new contacts you submit proposal for only 20 leads that is 200 and eventually 150 proposals you either lose the client stops responding what you close eventually is 50. so now you look at your stage wise conversion your overall conversion as we discussed in the example calculation was five percent but what is your stage wise conversion the conversion in the first stage moving from contact to qualified was 60 from qualified to proposal was 33 from proposal to closure was 25 now if you say okay let's improve our conversion 10 we're talking about moving from five percent to five point five percent or instead of closing 50 you're talking about closing 55 years but what happens if you improve your stagewise conversion by 10 so instead of improving five percent final conversion by 10 what happens if you improve the conversion at each stage by 10 so let's look at the same example so here if you remember earlier when you had a conversion of sixty percent for the first stage 600 deals move from contact to qualified but if you improve that 60 by 10 it becomes 66 percent hence you now have 660 deals moving to the qualification phase then again if you have a 10 Improvement and in the second stage while moving from qualification to proposal instead of 200 proposals you are now submitting 244 proposals and if you improve your final third stage conversion from 25 to 28 now you are submitting and you're winning 68 Deans so not 50 not 55 but you win 68 deals so your conversion now becomes seven percent so you close 18 more deals and your final conversion is 37 percent higher so if you targeted a 10 Improvement only on the end-to-end conversion you would have closed five more deals but if you break down the entire process into four stages and you see that okay let's go we're going to work on each stage as a sub process and we will improve the efficiency and the conversion of each stage by 10 each your final Improvement is a whopping 37 and you close 18 more deals so it's important that you look at your entire lead cycle as independent separate sub processes focusing only on the last stage makes it difficult to identify Improvement opportunities hence treat each stage of the sales funnel as a sub process and identify opportunities to improve conversion at each stage that not only makes it easier as it boils down to the root causes but the compounding effect is much higher so you understand the maths but let's talk about how do you improve conversion at eight stages that's the important part that we will discuss in this video so let's talk about how we've discussed what let's discuss how so how do you improve the conversion from new lead to qualification why are leads dropping off in the first very stage so some causes to look at would be the targeting so are you targeting the right customers uh when it comes to your digital ads for example if you Source new leads by placing ads on say search engines PPC advertising or you do social ads or Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Instagram or YouTube or even if you do cold calling or email campaigns so are you targeting the right customers so go back and look at your customer personas the demography of customers or for example age-wise demography location-wise demography so what uh customer segment is giving you most conversions so are you focusing on the right customer segment so go ahead and check that then marketing channels so you may have multiple marketing channels for example or you will be getting new leads via referral via cold calling via visits to your prospective clients exhibitions search engine advertising social uh organic leads via your blog posts what marketing channel is converting most and where are you spending so are these correlated so are you spending on channels that are not giving you qualified loans instead you should be spending more time resources Budget on channels that are converting more so go ahead and look at that report as well then look at the leave response time are you being prompt with your response to New Leads ideally your response time to every new lead should be the first response at least should be at least within the first five minutes don't delay it that's the golden period the moment a customer inquires about a service or a product he or she is expecting your response don't delay it the more you delay it becomes less likely that the customer would be available to answer your phone call so are you losing out opportunities because you are late in responding to leads go ahead and monitor that what's your lead response time if it is 24 hours for example on an average how could you first bring it down to 12 hours then six hours then two hours and then how can you set up processes and mechanisms to ensure that you reach out to more and more deals within those first couple of minutes of five minutes at least then you could look at your team resources the scripts or templates that they use for cold calling and emails FAQs how do they answer questions from customers so how could you improve these and then look at the content as well the ad copy the call to action or your landing page your email copy what tweaks and improvements can you make to each of these to ensure that more and more prospects move from the contact stage to the qualified stage so for the first stage these are five elements and there could be more but at least these five are what you should look at you should report you should monitor and then Target gradual Improvement in number or percentage of leads moving from the first stage which is contact to the second stage which is qualified now how do we make improvements for the second stage so how do we move more leads from the qualified stage to the proposal stage so again a few factors to look at first follow-ups check if your team or you yourself are adhering to the follow-up schedule so are you missing follow-ups now there's a good statistics that in B2B sales it requires on an average of five follow-ups to close deals so are you making all those follow-ups are you promising and not calling the customer or are you not promising at all so go and look up your schedule and your adherence and try and improve upon that maybe improve your follow-up frequency if you look at the schedule so do you want to improve the schedule or do you want to improve the adherence or maybe both then look at the messaging do you the information that you give to the customers at this stage is that meeting the expectations set in the ad copy so when the customer fills up an inquiry form or when he or she comes to you they come with an expectation that has been built basis the information in your online ad or on a landing page or on a brochure or maybe a referral given to the customer so the information that you now give to the customer in the second stage is that meeting the expectations that was earlier set in the ad copy so how can you improve that then do you maintain a list of customer objections what are the most common objections and how can you reduce them how can you better handle these objections and then test different combinations so are you only doing telecon conferences fly and do video meetings uh in-person meetings if you can do you have relevant case studies for every customer use case can those case studies and references build more confidence so that you can move more leads from the qualified stage to the proposal stage so again in this particular second stage these are four which I could recommend there could be more again that you could work upon look at the reports monitor these to improve your conversion to move more deals once they have qualified from qualified to the proposal stage now how do we improve conversion from proposal to closure so again a few suggestions first are you asking for feedback from all lost deals a lot of businesses don't do this but this is very important this is the actual voice of customer it's okay if a customer does not choose to buy from you or work with your business but call the customer thank them for the inquiry thank them for giving your business an opportunity to submit a proposal and present your case and then ask for a feedback why did they choose to go with some other business what was the reason was it pricing or was it the scope of work the deliverables what is it that the other business was doing or promise to doing better compared to your business then review the reasons for all your lost deals brainstorm with your team to find solutions for the most common causes for example are you losing most deals because of your pricing go ahead and check that are you pricing it right do you have a mechanism to code the pricing similarly review other top reasons then competition are you losing deals to a select few competitors if that's the case check why check what are they doing better than a B test five different formats for your proposals uh so how you are drafting your proposals the sequence of different points and sections in your proposal or are you sending proposals in an email expecting the customer and multiple decision makers to just browse through your proposal don't do that it's better that you present your proposal document or presentation in a meeting it could be a personal meeting it could be a video meeting but ensure that all decision makers come together with you in a meeting online or offline and you walk them through the proposal what that helps is if there are any questions about anything you're able to answer that rather than having them browse through your proposal in their own sweet time when you or your team is not present to answer their objections and then does the proposal justify the price if you've quoted a price but all your delivery boost enough for you to quote a particular price so answer these questions again to improve your conversion for the proposal stage so you look you need to look at each of the stages separately as a sub process don't try to improve the overall conversion because that makes the job a whole big different exercise because at times you have different teams different individuals working on different stages but getting new leads you may have a marketing team for qualification you may have a quality cold calling team or inside sales rep The Proposal stage you may have a senior executive or sales manager or you yourself may be going ahead and meeting your clients with the proposal so there are different people working at different stages so it makes sense to break down the entire lead cycle in different stages and understand the conversion at each stage and the reasons for low conversion and then identify what should you do to improve the conversion at each stage as discussed in the example earlier a 10 percent Improvement in these three stages would give you a 37 overall Improvement That's The Power of compounding and that's how you should go about it so thank you for watching the video any questions do write in the comment section well that was my video on sales conversion looking at sales conversion stage wise and identifying Improvement opportunities to slowly and gradually improve sales conversion to maximize your return on investment and return on ad spends hope you find the information useful if you have any feedback any questions or you want to share any tips please write in the comment section below if you want me to make more videos on any particular topic related to sales or business management or any other business category again please write in the comment section this was one of the videos in the sales series on my channel for other videos I will leave links in the video description so do check them out as well and if you've not do subscribe to my channel to support me until then take care be safe