Colin Sprake breaks down five core small-business problems: cash flow, finding profitable clients, retention, time management, and pricing. He argues persistent follow-up is the biggest sales lever. Most sales happen after 5 to 12 contacts, yet 48% of salespeople never follow up at all.
Let's look at some. The number one challenges that you experience in your business right now. Number one challenges, cash flow flying. It's like unidirectional. It's like, whoops, self sabotage. Great. New clients. New clients. So I want to put something in the middle in between. Who said new clients? You, Richard. I want to put the P word in the middle. New, profitable clients. How many of you have clients you wish you didn't have? Those ones that you gave your product to, you did something with, and you go, wow, why did I even take them on? How many of you have experienced that? Pretty much all of us. Absolutely. Okay. What else? Keeping. Wonder where that came from. Keeping old clients. So client retention. We're going to talk about that tonight as well. Client retention. What else? Not enough time. Not enough. How many of you have time challenges? Okay, so here's the key thing. You don't have time challenges. You have commitment challenges. You cannot manage time. You can only manage your commitments. We'll talk a little bit about that tonight. What else? Who agrees on that? Just before we go on, who agrees on that? It's your commitments. They're wasting your time. It's not that you haven't got enough time, because so many times we go out to meetings where people don't even have an agenda for the meeting. We go to a meeting, we sit down with people, we just want to go for coffee. Someone said that to me. I'll say, great, if you just want to go for coffee, number one, it becomes a glass of wine and it's after hours. I'm always fair about that. And number two, if it is during office hours, ask for an agenda. You have the right to ask for it. Like, what's your intention? It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be a long agenda. It could just be. I want to chat to you about the joint venture between the two businesses. Great, thanks. Now, I know what your intention is, but that's a key thing. None of us do that. Most people don't do that. We go out, we sit down, we drink coffee for two hours. We walk away and go, thanks for a nice coffee. It was great to meet you. Look forward to maybe doing something in the future. That's commitment. The time. We commit to doing activities that aren't profitable. Really, really important. What else? What are the challenges? What's the acronym for follow up? My favorite. I didn't say it. If you don't follow up with people, that's what you tell them. That's what you tell people. You don't follow up with them. My favorite acronym because so many business. I can tell you how many of you would realize your business would be in a much stronger place if you just did really good follow up. I watch it all the time. I, I watch all the time. I have people say to me, karan, I'd love to do business with you. And I go, great, phone me. I'm still waiting for some of them. The opportunity is gone though and they phone me. Now they have to phone me five times and I won't return a single phone call. I want to see how persistent they are at their follow up before you phone them back. If they want to do business with you, how hungry are they? Really, really important. Our office. Some people in this audience may not in this audience tonight but we had people in the audience that had been Cheryl's been in touch with for three years before people come into this audience. That's persistence every month. Oh come to the next one. Oh, sorry I missed this evening. I'm coming the next evening. Sorry I missed that evening. Coming the next evening just keeps on going. Most business owners. Here's the stats. I'll read them to you. This is a card from send out cards. Here's the stats. Maybe you want to write a few of these down because these will stick in some of your heads. You can come read it afterwards. It's there too. 48% of salespeople will never follow up with a prospect. How many of you have business cards sitting on your desk that you should have followed up on and you haven't followed up on yet? Be honest. A lot of us, 48% of leads sit on your desk and never get followed up on yet we go out to network more to get more leads to do another poor job. Doesn't make sense. Sound like insanity. Anyway, so 25% of people make a second point of contact. So 48% never follow up. 25% make a second point of contact. 12% of salespeople know only make three points of contact and only 10% of salespeople make more than three points of contact. And when I say three points of contact it's not blasting them out through an email blast and saying I've done that 10 times, I haven't done anything. It's good quality relation building contact. So here's where the funny, this is the other side of it. 2% of sales are made on the first point of contact. 3% of sales are made on the second point. 5% of sales are made on the third point of contact, 10% of sales are made on the fourth point of contact. 80% of sales are made on the 5th to 12th point of contact. Then we wonder why. Well, people don't buy from me. Well, you speak to them once, that's only 2% of the people who bought from you, 80% will buy from you when you speak to them on the fifth time or more. Really, really important. Really great card, great statistics. And that's pretty much across the board no matter which industry. Because I was in the mining industry for many years. One of the key things in the mining industry is that when I was in the mining industry, our lead time from first point of contact to sale, two and a half years and around $50,000 per client to schmooze them, entertained, whatever before you get the contract. Yeah, they're big contracts but a lot of money goes down before you get anywhere with them. Really, really important. Okay, so that's follow up. Follow up. I cannot say to you. How many are you going to do just from that tonight? When you do a little bit more follow up in your business, that's critical. Follow up is the most important thing. If I could just run a business just on follow up, I would because that's majority of the reason why most business owners fall down. What are the other challenges? Pricing. Now who's the challenge for in pricing? You or the client? That's for most of us. We don't believe in our own pricing. If we don't believe in our own pricing, how can we sell it to somebody else? Let's believe in our own value, believing in our own price of our product and service that we sell. Pricing is really important, but pricing is. Until you believe in your own pricing and the value that you have, you cannot sell it. Really, really tough if you don't believe. If you think your pricing is too expensive, you convey that message to a client before you even start talking to them. Who agrees with that? Yeah, it's pretty much that's exactly what it is. Ok Sam.
