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Episode 19 - Part 3: How to review your sales process and make it more effective
119 Plays2 years ago
In Part 3 of Episode 19, we're speaking with Simon Bath from PinLocal about how you can make your sales processes more effective which leads to better conversion rates.
Simon is the CEO of iPlaceGlobal which operates PinLocal, Moveable, iPlace Financial Services and Altium Legal.
Over the four parts of this episode, Simon shares his thoughts on a range of topics around sales, conversion rates and optimising processes.
In this third part, we discuss:
📊 Sales process optimisation and lead conversion
💽 Data-driven decision making
✅ The importance of consistency in sales
🔍 Reviewing your sales process and what to look at
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Transcript
The Importance of CRM in Sales
00:00:00
Speaker
One of the other aspects I wanted to discuss was how to review your sales process and make it more effective. So fine, you've got your leads in from whichever lead source. How do you start to understand if you're performing well and where do you start looking to improve that process?
00:00:21
Speaker
Hey, the first step, and you'd expect me to say this is one of them together, is to get a decent CRM, is to get the leads flowing into a platform that allows you to work those leads as well as possible. Anybody that's not using CRM technology for that is already starting at such a poor position to make the best return on investment on the money that they're spending on leads.
Simplifying Sales Processes
00:00:46
Speaker
Absolutely, first stage is CRM and then just make sure that the KPIs are really clearly defined. So understand the sales funnel from lead generated through to job one. And that might be going through standard sales processes of contacted, voicemail left, follow up call,
00:01:09
Speaker
and just understand where the metrics are at each stage. Don't overcomplicate it. Have very simple buckets that you can keep revisiting. And again, working out the balance for how you want to be perceived as a customer. So we'll give you an email address. We'll give you a phone number. How many times are you going to make a phone call without that phone being picked up? How many voicemails are you going to leave? How many emails are you going to send without response?
00:01:38
Speaker
are you going to be able to track open rates or click rates in your emails? But understand all that from the start, revisit it and refresh it along the way, but understand it from the start so that you can be consistent on your sales follow-up process. So many times when we help clients with that sales process and you kind of understand that actually some of these are simply not getting followed up at all and some are getting overworked, the inconsistencies is where it's really difficult to measure performance.
Data-Driven Decisions in Sales
00:02:07
Speaker
having a very consistent sales process which suits the profile of the business that you want to be is really crucial. Yeah, that's the consistent part is very important because if you really good period of following up and then you get busy and then you're focusing on all the jobs and then stop following up as well, then surprise, surprise and week two, week three, weeks, whatever your lag time is, you suddenly get a lull and why, but it's all tied back to the busy period where you get following up on these books. And by the time you hit the lull, you're too late because
00:02:37
Speaker
the lungs because the inconsistency in lead conversion or even lead follow up happened two, three, four weeks ago. So it sounds really simple and it sounds straightforward, but actually just defining what that process is and being true and consistent to it at all times will give you your best chance of at least measuring your return or investment. Might not be the ROI that you want, but at least you've got that chance to measure it properly.
00:03:06
Speaker
Yeah. Funnily, years and years and years and years ago when I worked in retail, this is 10 plus years ago, there was a bakery section in the store. You'd often find a particular day someone would completely overbake certain items and they're going, oh, people love these. And you go, no, no, you love these, but the data doesn't show anyone by this time of night. The data behind it, it just ties in with what you said. You know, you can think that
00:03:32
Speaker
one lead source is working well, or one job type converts better, or one location type works better. But unless you really have that data to look at, you can't do anything. Yeah. And it's so hard to do without CRM, right? So hard to do. You know, we can deliver our leads as we do with you guys via API straight into platforms. We can deliver them via email for people that, you know, can only accept that. And it's very, very difficult and very manual and tends to be one of those processes that kind of just get left to one side.
00:04:02
Speaker
And so it's then very difficult to measure, well, this, you know, this, this monthly investment that I'm making into acquiring new customers, is this, is it working out? Well, am I getting a decent return? Should I increase or should I decrease the volume? But really, until you've got that data in front of you, you're making uninformed decisions.
Review and Adapt Sales Strategies
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good point. And I tried to avoid being too salesy about, or any talk about when it comes to the podcast and so on. But you're right, it is about consistency of process and access to data. And if you have very manual processes, one, it slows you down in terms of being able to follow up. And two, it's your reporting is then only as good as the data that you put into a spreadsheet. So if you haven't captured the exact time the league came in, the exact time you've responded, the exact time
00:04:47
Speaker
you followed up, you can't generate those metrics as to how good your sales process is. Exactly. And it's also very hard to see, are you performing really well on one type of job but badly on another so you know it actually is the lead source
00:05:01
Speaker
not working well, is it a job that's not working well? Yep. There's huge benefits to that consistency aspect, the follow-ups that you mentioned and all that type of stuff to get people at the right time. How often should you, I suppose, review your sales process? The daily I'm assuming is too much, but I would say is also way too infrequent, so when's the right time? I would say a quarterly review. Again,
00:05:32
Speaker
We've had a strange market for the last few years, and we're going back to that point of immediate follow up. You know, people picking up the phone pretty much any time of day because, you know, the majority of people were working remotely. We've started to see a slight shift from that back into office working. So I think it's important to review that on a fairly regular basis.
00:05:54
Speaker
But again, you've got to give it chance to to to show data that is there to review. And if if you're constantly tweaking on a weekly basis, you're not going to start to see those trends that you really want to see to say, you know, what the follow ups that we do between four p.m. and five thirty p.m. every day are converting at twice the level of the ones from one to two p.m. Let's carry on with that. If you tweak it too much and have sporadic kind of behaviors around those KPIs, you'll send yourself mad.
00:06:23
Speaker
So yeah, I would I would be Internally we do ourselves. I would expect since come to review that on a quarterly basis Yeah, I think that's that's a very good point around allowing enough time because it's very easy to suddenly get a hunch or feel frustrated or something I'm gonna change this and this and this and this and again. Yeah, which variable had the effect now it's yeah and that goes back to price as well, right because
00:06:47
Speaker
You know, oh, my God, my price is too high. My price is too low. You know, I'm going to tweak it again. If you if you've made the decision for the price point to be that you based it on good data, you should have done. So give it time. Give it time to play out before you make major reactions because you've had a really bad day or a really good day of conversion.
Capturing Detailed Sales Metrics
00:07:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:07:08
Speaker
And I suppose on that point of conversion, what metrics should you look at when you're doing a sales process? Because conversion is obviously an easy one to look at or more obvious one to look at. But how detailed should you get? Should you do it by location or job type or just conversion rate we look at or is it average fee? Yeah, I would, again, depending on the profile of the business, then I would actually build in as much as I could into that because it's going to give you valuable data at every point.
00:07:38
Speaker
Essentially, you're looking to build in a total ROI. So come all the way back to invoice, pre and post cancellation, mapping that back to lead, and then start to build in, like you say, location, survey type, time taken, you know, from lead generated to invoice paid. I would build all of that into a dashboard. And again, once you've got it set up, it will pretty much look after itself.
00:08:05
Speaker
Yeah, I think I agree with that. And one of the things we try to build in is a big reporting page that has all of these overlays for lead source and job type and user. But I think it's nice to be able to capture, I think, conversion rates, value of the converted jobs, average fee, and understand, is it level two is working really well? Is it evaluations working well? Is it building surveys?
00:08:33
Speaker
rather than just a lead source overall or you know maybe do that again by location you can get really sort of drilled down if you want to and you want to refine things because then you can tailor things in different places as well. Absolutely you can become more targeted you know and if you're looking to then grow your team you know bringing in somebody who can do valuations in Birmingham A is going to produce a fantastic yield
00:08:59
Speaker
So yeah, I don't think you can have too much granularity when it comes to that performance reporting. You can dip in and out and choose different report types, but I think it's really important to have that level of detail when you're trying to make those decisions.