Stop Tracking Close Rate (Track This Instead)

A lot of times you don't need a better closer. You just need better calls on the calendar. I talk to so many high-ticket businesses time and time again, and one of the biggest things that I see is they obsess over their close rate. And in today's video, I'm going to be talking about why your close rate actually doesn't matter and the metrics you should be looking at and levers you can pull that don't have anything to do with actually hiring a better closer or being better at sales. And contrary to popular belief, being a sales bro or like hard closing prospects is not the way to actually scale your business. And usually there's other things that are broken within the process if you're having to do that. If you don't know me, my name is Eric Deeran. I've built an 8-figure business. I've booked over 15,000 sales calls, and I've worked with over 800+ high-ticket business owners to help them scale their advertising so they can get more qualified calls and sign more clients predictably. And in today's video, we're going to break down what this looks like and what you actually need to be doing to increase the amount of sales that you're getting without actually increasing your close rate. And this is why you don't need better closers. You actually need better leads. The number one trap we see is that your close rate drops and then you blame the closer. And sometimes that is the case. Sometimes the closer actually sucks. Sometimes they, they're, you know, losing deals on the call. I would look at what those calls look like because when you dive deep A lot of times it's actually the lead quality. And there's a lot of ways we can actually fix the lead quality, because if you didn't look at the lead quality, you'd probably say, well, it's the closer. I need to hire the closer. I need to find a new closer. I need to ramp them up. I need to train them. And that would be the wrong move in this instance because you'd be wasting your time doing something that doesn't actually move the needle in your business. And so I would look at number one, what is the lead quality? And also, if you have multiple closers, look at all the closers and are all the closers stuck in the same rut? If everybody across the board has a lower close rate, it's typically the lead quality and that's the main problem. And depending on who you serve, whether it's B2B or B2C, Most of the time the lead quality is determined by the ad, what you're saying in the ad, and then the pre-call page. How much education are you doing in the pre-call page? How much education are you doing in the ad? And how much trust are you building here prior to that actual call? Because that's going to do most of the heavy lifting. You could have the best closer in the world, but if these people don't trust you when they get on the phone with you, or you don't have supporting assets to get them to trust you when they get on the phone with you, it's going to be an uphill battle the entire way. And a lot of this lead quality has to do with what objective are you actually optimizing for in the Ads Manager, right? So if you're running running your ads, are you optimizing for leads or are you optimizing for schedules? And these have totally different outcomes depending on what you're optimizing for. If you're optimizing for leads, you're going to get people who are most likely to become a lead. And if you don't have a lot of data, that's fine and you can start there and that's great. But when you optimize for schedules, you actually get people who want to book a call and are— you're optimizing around people who will book a call with you. That's the key difference. We even do something in our funnel where when somebody schedules a call with us, we have someone manually approve it and make sure that it's not spam. And then they send that back to the pixel as an actual call and as a qualified call. And when we do that, we're only sending back the best data back to Meta. This way it can't optimize around bad quality leads. And so whether you can optimize for lead or schedule really just comes down to how much money are you spending per day? Because if you have ad sets here, each ad set needs to get at least one event per day. And if it isn't, then it's going to keep bouncing audience pockets and keep looking in all these different areas for where your actual customer is if it's not getting one. And so depending on your budget and how much you're spending per day, if you're not spending enough to get one scheduled call per day, you have to optimize for leads. And then once you get to the point where you're you're getting at least one scheduled call per day based on your budget, then you can start optimizing for schedules again because you want to optimize typically for whatever is furthest down the funnel, right? And so if you have leads, calls, sales, at first you have to optimize for leads, then you can optimize for calls, and very rarely can you optimize for sales in a high-ticket funnel because you're typically not going to be getting one sale per day depending on how much you charge and what your, your actual ticket price is. But optimizing for calls and then qualified calls is the best way to get that quality up. And when you're getting better people on the phone, you're going to notice they have a higher show rate And a higher close rate. This is what always annoys me because I see so many people where they're like, oh, you can get your show rate up by doing this. You can get your close rate up by doing that. And like, those things do work. But have we ever just looked at like, what is the lead quality? Is the lead quality like dogshit? Is it bad? If it's bad, then there's no amount of, you know, pretexting or objection handling or things that you can do if the person literally has no money for it. And that's always been my stance on it. And that's why I think a lot of sales gurus are like, oh, you can get your close rate up by, you know, 500%. You can get your close rate up to 80%. When in reality, you just need better lead quality because the leads are better. You're going to close more of them. Assuming you already have the skills of sales and you're doing all the best practices when it comes to show rate and close rate and XYZ. And also, if you want our help doing that, there's a link below to schedule a call with us. You can learn more about how we actually help high-ticket businesses scale, get better quality leads, and ultimately just get more qualified calls and sign more clients. But moving on. So number 1, I want to look at if your close rate drops, it might not be the closer. Number 2, the lead quality. Number 3, I said before that close rate doesn't matter. I don't look at that. And so what I look at is I look at cash per booked call. The cash per booked call is the show rate times the close rate times AOV. And so it's all of these metrics in one. This tells me what my return on rep actually is. So if you have closers, so many teams are like, oh, you know, we want to have the highest close rate, we want to have the best, you know, show rate, when in reality what I'm really looking for is what is my cash per booked call per rep. And so if you have closer number 1 and you have closer number 2, closer number 1 could have a really bad show rate and a really bad close rate, but they're selling something extremely high ticket and their cash per call is say $3,000. Closer number 2 could have a really high show rate, a really high close rate, but they're selling something really cheap. They're not not getting the full payment plan or, or they're not getting the full amount of money upfront. They're getting really small payment plans. They could have something like $1,000 cash per booked call. And then when I look at that, let's say that I pay $500 for a call. Well, out of those 2 people, who would you rather give calls to? The one where you put $500 in and get $3,000 out? Or would you rather put $500 in and only get $1,000 out? Well, obviously I'm going to pick closer number one because they are clearly making me more money for my money. And closers can very easily manipulate the show rate, the close rate, by canceling calls or telling them the price beforehand or just Doing any sort of tricks or things that they can do to manipulate that stat. That's why I don't look at that stat, because you can't argue with, I gave you this many calls and you closed this much money. This is your cash per call. It is a keystone metric that tells you about all of the other metrics in one, and they literally can't fake it, right? And so there's no way to get around it. It's either it's high or it's low. And then we basically do lead routing based on it's either high or it's low. And so that's why I don't care about close rate, because you might close 10% on an offer that's $100,000, and then you might close 80% on an offer that's $5,000. I would rather close 10% on the $100,000 $100,000 deal. A, because I don't need as many clients to hit my income goals or my revenue goals. And B, because I'm going to actually make more profit at the end of the day because I don't have to hire as many staff. I don't have to hire as many people on fulfillment. I don't have to do as much on fulfillment. I can simply just have one client that pays me $100,000 instead of having, what is it, 20 clients that would have to pay me $5K. And so that's why I'm always looking at what my cash per call is. This is so, so key. You have to look at this and it's a very easy and simple metric to tell, is this closer good or are they bad? And then what do I need to do to help them fix it? And the easiest way to do this is you just take how many calls did they book, divide How many calls did they take or how many, how many calls were booked on their calendar? And then how much money did they collect? And you just divide. So hopefully this helps. This is what I look at. If the close rate's going down, I'm typically looking at you need better quality leads. And then finally, when I look at my cash per call, I can look at that at an ad level as well. And so maybe ad number 1 gets me a $3K cash per call, but ad number 2 gets me a $1,000 cash per call, right? And so maybe it's something within the messaging. You also have to look at what closer did these calls go to, right? But if the closer is the same, maybe the messaging in ad number 2 just doesn't have as high of a cash per call, and then you can optimize your ads around this as well. This is one of the many things we look at when we work with high-ticket businesses to help them scale. Uh, link down in the description if you want to book a call with our team and see if we can possibly help. And with that being said, hopefully this is helpful. We'll see you in the next video.