Would you like to improve the sales of your business?
When it comes to improving sales, most small business owners think “I need to do more marketing!” or “I need to generate more leads!”.
But when was the last time you sat down and took some time to improve your conversion rate, or the process of converting all the leads you are getting already?
A great place to start is to document your sales process.
Here are four steps to help you get started:
1) Flowchart your sales process.
Document the steps that you go through to get the sale. For some businesses, this can be a very short process. What are the steps that help your customers’ purchase decisions? What do you do to make people buy your product or subscribe to your service and make them perceive your product as a good fit?
2) Review the number of steps in your sales process
Ask yourself these questions: “Do I have I got too many steps? Have I complicated things? Am I drawing things out where I don’t need to? Can I simplify parts of it? Do I need to actually add some steps?”. Perhaps it would be more effective if you were to add a step where you send a little video (testimonials or case studies) at the beginning of your customers involvement process to help them with their decision. Write down what works and what doesn’t so you know what to do next.
3) Work out what tools or resources you need to support each step of the sales process.
For example, a tool may come in form of a script. If so, don’t sound like an automated robot having it word for word. Think of key questions and be more personalised with your customers. What is the key information that you need to ask those questions to find out what the customer actually wants so you can decide if you are a fit? With the right information, you can make the right recommendations so that they can achieve the outcomes your customers are after. These tools would help them choose you on why you might be better to do that job or buy from you rather than your competitor(s).
4) Measure each step of your sales process
Lastly, by mapping out and documenting your sales process, you will be able to measure each step and will make business diagnoses easy for you. When you have a couple different steps for your sales process, you might even be able to work out where exactly your business is falling off, or the where the key issues are. Your conversion rate might be very high doing the quote, but might be a lot lower when you are converting the quote. So perhaps in that case, adding a step to follow up will be a likely solution that can be tested.
