E185: 3 Simple Hacks to Identify Where Your Sales Process Is Breaking Down and How to Fix it - And Improve Your Leadership

In this episode, you will learn how to diagnose exactly where your sales process is breaking down and how to fix it. Welcome to Sales Growth Made simple. The show helping seven to eight figure trade construction and industry sales and business leaders finally end the stress of inconsistent sales by simplifying your sales systems so your team can close more deals and grow faster. I'm your host, Ben Wright, a leader who has been building businesses and sales teams just like you for the last 20 years. By the end of this episode, you should have a really good idea around how you can diagnose exactly where your sales process is falling down and more importantly, how you can go about fixing it. We're going to focus just on those two things today because in my experience, if you can work out where your sales process isn't quite running smoothly, the the solutions become really quite impactful to how you can grow your sales. And look, I'd have to say, having worked with close to a thousand salespeople over the last few years now, that it's amazing how often small changes have made significant differences to people's businesses. And I mean, have a think about time perhaps in your business or in your sales team when you've actually made a small change that has made a significant positive impact to your business. Being faster in terms of how you talk to customers, changing some minor elements around your offer or your pricing, engaging with customers in slightly different ways. I certainly know from personal experience that we've had moments where we have moved something as simple as our quote template from one that's had a focus very much on the product to one that's rolled in a few more stories and a few more examples specifically that are unique to that customer. That is, if we've been dealing with a flour mill, we've been able to roll in examples of a flour mill, for example, and where we've made those subtle changes around our quot templates to tell a few more stories and have them a little bit more specifically related to our customer. How we've been able to really significantly move the dial. Now, that's one isolated example, but certainly across my sales career, I've found that small changes to sales process have often yielded exceptional results. So that's what we're going to look at today. So how do we diagnose exactly where our process is breaking down? Well, the important thing that we need to do here is to be able to have some metrics or some measurement around where people in our sales process are falling off. So if I give you some examples here and These are the most common places where we'll see people falling off. What we need to be able to understand is first of all, when a lead comes in the door, how many of those leads are actually getting to the first meeting? For every 10 leads that we have coming in the door, how many of those are getting to a quote? Okay, so the second area that we really need to try and understand is for every meeting that we book, that is a lead comes in the door and we book a meeting with that person, how many of those people are not showing up? Now this is particularly impactful for people who are coming to us. So whether having video calls, phone calls, or perhaps someone coming to our offices or showrooms. And less so impactful when we're going out to site because generally the show up rates are pretty high. But really understanding how many people are actually arriving to our first meeting or our first appointment, post that lead, post that initial inquiry that we've had is another really important area to be understanding the statistics around how many are actually showing up. The third area is when we get to site, how many people are we meeting that are then turning into quotes. Right? Really important area to say, okay, we're going out to site, how many of the people that we visit are we actually putting quotes out for? Now, it's not as strong in terms of drop off rates or causing issues to sales processes as perhaps the first two. However, certainly one that is a number that we really want to be able to understand in our business. And the last but not least here is from every person that we quote, how many of them are closing and going ahead? So if we go through those four again, because I did move through them pretty quickly, this is a short and sharp, jam packed episode. But to be really clear around diagnosing exactly where our process is breaking down, we need to have some control around the numbers. So the first one was for every lead that comes in the door, how many are getting to that first meeting? For every meeting booked, how many are actually showing up or attending the meeting? For every first meeting that we have, how many are we quoting? How many of those people or those customers are we quoting? And the last one is for every person or customer that we get a quote out to, how many of them are moving ahead. Now, how we measure those is different for every business. A lot of businesses are using CRMs. They have a level of automation, and even in the trade, construction industry, those type of segments, we have plenty of businesses that are using CRMs, even free versions. HubSpot has a great free version that they're using CRMs to be able to map those. So if you're a business that's doing that, I'd highly recommend that you make sure you have metrics and vitals around those four areas. If you're not using a CRM, then for many businesses the next best option is a spreadsheet. That's okay, right? We're after progress over perfection here. 1% better each and every day. For me, if you have an Excel spreadsheet and that's how you're recording your leads and your quotes and your meetings and so forth, that's absolutely fine as long as you can get across those vitals. And look, if you don't have that, I'd absolutely be recommending that you get an Excel spreadsheet up and running. They're not hard to build. Lead comes in, write it down. Have your four categories, lead, first meeting, quote and close. Make sure you get them into the spreadsheet and you just manually do it. It's a little bit more time, but perhaps you could have someone in the business help you do it or at least do it at the end of each day. Because if you can't get control of those metrics and really understand where your drop off areas are, then it's very difficult to diagnose exactly where your process is breaking down. So that without doubt is the best way to understand exactly where your sales process is breaking down. If you have a lead to first meeting ratio of 60, 70, 80%, they're really strong numbers. If you then have a show up rate of 70, 80, 90%, you're probably okay too. If you have a first meeting to quote rate, you'd want these numbers to be pretty high. At least 70%. And then if you have a quote to close rate of at least 30%, anything lower than that, we definitely have some room to improve. Then your vitals are probably okay. But have a think as I went through those numbers, anything for the first three areas of 60, 70% plus and anything from quote to close of 30% plus. If you have any areas in those metrics that are not hitting those numbers, then we probably have some leaky buckets happening there. If all of them are okay, but just hitting 60%, just hitting 70%, maybe hitting 28, 30% in terms of close rate. Right. Then please get in touch with me because there was something in there that we can deep dive into and find how we can move the dial. So how do we fix this? Really important. I'm going to quickly go through across those four areas that a key lever you can really pull to help to correct these and get your sales growing and moving forward. My key recommendation here is going to be just pick one. Because each of these on their own can be really significant in moving the dialogue of your business. And in fact, Wednesday's episode this week is going to talk about how a painter doubled his business in eight weeks. That's it. It took him eight weeks to double his business and he did some very small things to do so. But let's get back to where we are today. So if your lead to quote or visit, so your lead to site visit ratio is low. So leads are coming in the door, but you're not getting out to meet with them or they're not coming in to see you. My encouragement here is to look at how fast you are responding or engaging with those leads. When people or businesses engage with a provider to try and get a quote on something, that's generally when their excitement, their relative excitement is the highest that it's gonna get to. So we wanna be matching our energy with theirs. When they're excited, when they're ready to talk, we wanna be aiming to do so as fast as we possibly can. So talk to them quickly. If you're not getting people showing up, I'd start to think about whether or not your business is creating enough curiosity, so enough initial value for them to say, hey, I actually liked what they had to say in that first minute or two we had on the phone. I want to hear more. So it's very much that elevator pitch piece. It doesn't have to be fast talking, you know, very smooth one lines. But we've got to be able to create enough curiosity that people are going to turn up to the next session with us. If you're struggling to get from your first meeting to a quote, I'd also recommend you look at the curiosity levels you're creating, but dig a level deeper. So are you actually understanding what the customer wants? Because as soon as you understand what they want, then it's much easier for you to start to talk about what you could offer them. And then from there it becomes a lot more straightforward to be able to put that quote out for them. And last but not least, if you're quoting but not closing, then there's absolutely an alignment piece. There are a whole lot more levers that we need to look at here. But I'd encourage you to actually first of all think about, have you presented a quote that actually lined up with what the customer wanted? Have you tailored your quotation to exactly what was most important to them. If they were building a home and they wanted it to be in a certain type of cladding, have you suggested that cladding? Right. Really straightforward example. If you are in the real estate game and you are trying to find them a home, Right. So you're a buyer's advocate and you're trying to find them a home, does your proposal specifically call out the suburbs that they're looking for? Right. So very simple things around making sure we're aligning with what's important to the customer. Okay, so that's today's episode. Very much around diagnosing exactly where your sales process is falling down. We spoke about four areas lead through to first meeting people who turn up. So no show rates for your first meetings, first meeting to quotes. So actually getting a quote out from that first meeting and then quote to close ratios. What I'm hoping you have running in your head right now is a sense of curiosity to say, I really want to dig into these numbers. I really want to understand exactly where things are falling down. If not that, a gut feel that says, actually, you know what, my no show rates are too high. I'm booking these appointments, but they're not turning up. I need to do something about it. So we are dropping episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Fridays. They're short, sharp, jam packed with a big focus on being 1% better each and every day. It's all about having progress rather than perfection. So please, from this episode today, I want you to think about one thing that you can change because it really can make all the difference when you do it. That's it for today. See you on Wednesday. Bye for now. Are you frustrated spending hours of wasted time on sales quotes that you keep losing without changing something? Now you'll continue to get these same stressful results over and over again. My free quote audit will pinpoint exactly why you're not winning more jobs and what you need to do to increase your close rates quickly. 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