Dozens
of industries across Australia are taking advantage of the oldest
marketing strategy in the world, selling skills while many businesses
struggle on, oblivious to the benefits.
Selling is part of increasing conversion rates, which is the term
used to describe the ration of the difference between how many
people contact your business to how many buy. This may not make
sense but let me ask you this question do you want more customers
than you currently have buying from you? Most people say yes,
however you can't get more customers! You can only generate an
inquiry. Something has to happen before the person becomes a customer.
A 'conversion' of some sort has to take place. So to get more
customers you can only increase leads or your 'conversion rate'.
Here is a case study of a business that I worked with as a business
coach and mentor to increase their monthly turnover and profit
by increasing their conversion rates and other marketing strategies.
Firstly before you can improve any aspect of a business it's best
to know what the numbers are. So in this we needed to know the
conversion rates. The business owner's name is Leanne and so I
asked Leanne for figures that firstly indicated where all the
leads came from for all the advertising she was currently doing.
Then we looked at the conversion rates for all the lead sources.
This includes Yellow Pages, newspaper, word of mouth and referrals.
The conversion rates vary depending on the lead generation.
For Leanne's business we found the conversion rates varied a lot
from the lead sources. Not only that there were two sets of numbers
not one. When the phone rang a lot of people were looking for
prices or rough ideas on price. From thisd initial inquiry we
found the conversion rate was around 6% from Yellow Pages up to
15% for referrals on jobs won over the phone by quote or for conversion
into people who wanted a face to face quote.
I get excited by these numbers, however Leanne couldn't understand
why at first. You see, if you increase the conversion rate from
6% to 9% that's a huge potential increase, it equates to a 50%
increase in customers, not a 3% increase as some people are lead
to believe. So when I see numbers that small, and I often do,
I get excited.
The first thing we addressed in trying to improve this was a phone
script for the ladies who answered the phone. Neither of the ladies
had any sales background or training so I worked with Leanne over
about 6 weeks to teach her our system and philosphy on selling.
We worked on an exact script for the ladies to learn and use and
the results were excellent.
The number of calls to quotes or sales on the spot increased to
60%+ from Yellow Pages alone. Meanwhile we had redesigned the
Yellow Pages ad for her business, which came out soon after the
scripts were introduced. The Yellow Pages ad doubled the phone
inquiries and attracted a much better class of customer. To further
increase the response from the ad we introduced a guarantee for
the business. The major frustration we found for the customers
dealing with the blind industry was sales people not turning up
on time or even at all. So we guaranteed the company's sales person
would.
The Yellow Pages ad guaranteed to be on time for the quote or
the customer would get $20 free. This had two great effects. Firstly
the customer knew the sales person would turn up and secondly
the sales person, Leanne's husband, had to be on time which enhanced
his time management skills.
The next strategy we worked on was to introduce a face to face
script. This took us about 5 weeks again as this was more involved.
I taught Leanne Action's principles of selling and she combined
that with the questions she had to ask. We assessed each and every
line of the script for it's ability to build rapport and keep
the customer interested. We made sure there were plenty of questions
so as to give the customer the freedom to say what they want.
In
Action we coined a phrase which says, 'sell don't tell'. This
means if you're 'telling' people by making statements they can
always disagree. It's impossible to disagree with a question however,
so we always ask customers questions so as they tell us what they
want to buy and why what they say is important so they understand
as well as what we do why they want something.
Over a few months of fine tuning of all the scripts, the results
have been outstanding. From an initial inquiry we were getting
around 6-10% conversion into face to face quotes. On face to face
quotes the company was getting about 25% from our initial measurements.
After 4-6 months the conversion from initial inquiries was 60%
and the face to face conversion has achieved a figure of 70%+.
In fact in 1 month Leanne's husband did 20 quotes and got 19 of
them as acceptances to do the work, which is amazing. The ladies
on the phone were initially skeptical about using scripts but
Leanne 'sold them' on the idea (with a bit of coaching on how
to from me). The ladies slowly tried the scripts and were surprised
to see how effective they were.
The ladies go out of their way to give advice to callers and don't
try to force the sale at all. They've realised selling is about
wanting to genuinely help a person to get what they want not necessarily
to get what the sales person wants, whether that means getting
the sale or not.
A new experienced sales person has just recently joined the team
after giving her previous employer 2 weeks notice. Leanne gave
her a copy of the DISC information on behaviour of people and
by applying the ideas contained in this 12 page document (which
I give away to my clients as part of the coaching program), her
sales increased 250% (sales for the weeks before averaged $5 000/
week with no other training from Leanne and the week later they
hit $12 000). Just by reading the documentation and acting on
it. It was against her judgement but she thought she would try
what was suggested.
Now
Leannes business is growing strongly. Her new sales lady is achieving
75%+ conversion rates thanks to the new scripts and thinking more
along the lines of the DISC profiles of people. As they say, Business
is Booming.
For
more information call ACTION International on 1800 670 335
