SalesNexus Online Contact Management
If you qualify well, or better said qualify accurately and do it up front, as a first step in your sales process, then you can minimize the time your team spends on leads that won’t buy and maximize the time they spend on leads that will.
So first let’s consider how big an impact better qualifying could have on your business first. Here are a few questions you’ll need to know the answer to:
∙ What are the crucial steps in the sales process? Examples - Set appointment, presentation, proposal, close
∙ How much time is typically spent on each step?
∙ How many new leads or prospects does each rep typically go through this process with in a given period (week, month, quarter...)?
∙ How many of them buy?
If you don’t have this information, ask your team to start making a list of every presentation, proposal, etc. that they do for about twice the length of your typical sales cycle. Then just crunch the numbers. More information at: http://www.salesnexus.com.
Here’s an example:
Let’s say a sales person typically works with 50 new leads each month and each decent lead typically gets a 30 minute phone call, a one hour presentation and a proposal that requires 30 minutes to create. Add to that all the calls and emails that go into coordinating meeting times and following up, trying to close and you’re easily up to 3 hours per lead or 150 hours per month. We’ll assume that you have a 20 % overall close rate so, that means 10 out of 50 leads buy. So it takes 15 (150 divided by 10) hours of sales time to get a purchase.
So, 80% of the folks that your team spends all this time on don’t buy. That’s 40 leads getting 3 hours each or 120 hours of sales time spent on leads for no return, every month. What if you just started asking the right questions up front and decided not to go on appointments until you get the right answers or at least to hold off on the presentation and proposal? Imagine that you could filter out 20% of the leads up front with a solid, simple series of questions that you use as the "bar" that leads have to get over before they "earn" your sales team’s expensive time?
Now, 20% of 50 leads is 10 leads x 3 hours amounts to 30 hours freed up each month! That’s almost a week of each sales person’s time! Obviously that’s significant. It lowers the time spent per sale from 15 hours to 12 hours. That can’t help but improve your bottom line! More information at: http://www.salesnexus.com.
SalesNexus
Houston, Texas
http://www.salesnexus.com
