Ways to Increase Your Sales Conversion Rate
I’m sure all of you like to know how to increase your Sales Conversion Rate.
It’s really simple, the Number of Customers you have is dependent on 2 functions: Number of Leads and your Conversion Rate.
So, what does that mean?
New Customers = Leads Generated x Conversion Rate (%)
In my experience, most business owners keep working on lead generation strategies because they want more sales. But as an efficient business advisor, all my years of working with businesses, we are trained to ensure that we establish LOW hanging fruits in a business.
I always ask my clients – which one is the bigger problem for you?
#1 – Having leads, but NOT being able to convert them?
… or….
#2 – NOT having enough leads to convert?
On top of that, Lead Generation Strategies are usually costlier than Conversion strategies. Conversion strategies are usually Process Oriented, and usually new enquiries did not buy because of some drop-off. Our jobs as a business advisor, is to find out why, and see if we can fix it.
When conversion of leads is a problem in your business, a few places you should looking into:
- Measuring the conversion at each stage of your sales process, and find out where prospects are falling off or getting stuck…
- Get your team members to measure why prospects did not buy, and get some statistics on it…
- Ask a few recently successful customers, on exactly why they bought? What were their deciding factors? ~ some people don’t remember, but it’s a good question to ask if they are observant enough
- Ask a few prospects (that did not buy), why they held off? And who did they eventually buy from? ~ this is tough, and not many people do it, but its great if you really want to get to the bottom of the problem, without wasting more time and money
Let me give you an example: One of our printing client were turned away because prospects were concerned with turnaround time of getting the job done on time. He provided a money-back guarantee to get the job done. This created a risk-free purchase for prospects it fixed his conversion rate from 8% to 19% in 4 weeks!
Conversion can happen in many different stages of creating the lead.
Sometimes its during a telemarketer’s phone call, or even conversion of a brochure. Conversion can be different for different sources of the lead. The best conversion is having Referrals from existing clients. Although the volume may not be that high, the quality is certainly very good.
Sometimes conversion is on our website; and our website needs to have a call to action. A call to action is described as what we want our prospects to do next, if they are interested. For example, a number to call, an email to send, etc.
Conversion could also involve our employees who are faced with prospects and customers. Sometimes it’s about training our staff to know what to say to potential customers in order to seal the deal, versus “I DONT KNOW”. Employees can be equipped with FAQ (frequently-asked-questions), and trained through role-play on how to answer simple questions by prospects. These can create a great deal of confidence for prospects to convert easily.
Conversion is about addressing the section in our sales process where prospects fell off, and it’s as simple as following up. It’s too easy to keep throwing money at lead generation. We need to address the bottle neck of where are leads are getting stuck, and leads LEAK out of our funnel, we waste more money.
Conversion determines how hard our Marketing Investments work for us, and conversion is about how efficient we are. This reduces our Acquisition Cost of New Customers.
I hope this article gives you MORE CLARITY on How to Increase Your Sales Conversion Rate. If you would like to hear more, head on to my video, Do You Need Better Conversion or More Leads in Your Current Business Situation.
Asia’s Top Business Growth Specialist – Maresa Ng
Maresa Ng is a Passionate Entrepreneur who helps business owner grow their business to a stage where it is commercial, profitable, and can continue to work without them. Maresa has worked with thousands of business owners and she has been turning around businesses since 2008. She was a corporate and investment banker, but now she is the leading Business Growth Specialist & Business Advisor in South East Asia. She always believes, as entrepreneurs, you can have Great Quality of Life through Great Business!
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