Leigh Simpson
For many businesses, a common assumption is that more web traffic is needed to drive growth. Upon closer inspection, this is rarely the case.
Around 80% of the time, different levers need to be pulled; the most effective one is simple to fix and can increase revenue dramatically; read on to discover what it is.
Responding To Uncertainty
People rarely ask for help when things are going well; it's usually when they sense something could be better or things are going badly wrong.
With specifier and buyer behaviour rapidly shifting, businesses that have relied upon sales more than marketing to drive specification and enquiry generation are increasingly finding things more challenging.
Headlines about a deep recession and global economic crisis amplify concerns that hard times are ahead. Many firms will hunker down, cut costs and ride out the storm.
Others will try to stimulate the top of the sales funnel – more social media, SEO, Google Ads, trade advertising, email marketing, instructing the sales team to 'get out there and shake the tree'.
Key Levers For Sales Improvement
Without a holistic review of your complete sales and marketing process, this is more likely to burn cash and divert resources from more fundamental issues, which are usually simple to fix.
Your review is likely to highlight one or more of the following issues;
- A low website conversion rate
- Poor lead response
- Slow pricing times
- A weak quotation follow-up process
Let's cover these in more detail and explain why they are crucial to long-term sustainable growth and how tackling one alone can change your fortunes today.
Low Website Conversion
Too often, good fit traffic is landing on your website but unable to find the information they need or faced with barriers such as logins, big forms and uninspiring imagery. These visitors click 'back' and visit your competitor's site instead.
Your website must be optimised not just for search (SEO) but also for conversion. Clarify your value proposition, invest in professional photography and high-quality graphics, structure your product information so specifiers and installers can find what they need quickly and easily and make it as easy as possible to contact you.
Don't scrimp on the development and maintenance of your site – a good website will deliver more sales opportunities than a dozen salespeople. Contrast the cost of a good salesperson with what you spend annually on website-related activity – how do those numbers compare? If they're not similar, you need to look at your budgets.
The problem is that researching, designing and developing a best-in-class website takes time and effort, and you need results today.
So, although you cannot ignore website conversion metrics, you need something else to kick-start your sales recovery.
Poor Lead Response
How confident are you that marketing leads are being followed up quickly, or even at all?
Slow response is criminal. No follow-up is gross misconduct.
If a potential specifier or customer goes to the trouble to fill in your 15-question website form to ask you a technical or pricing question, at least have the courtesy to thank them for the enquiry and tell them when you will respond.
Time and again, we hear excuses about why these leads aren't followed up and listen to frustrated marketing teams as they explain that all of their hard work is going to waste.
If you are too busy to follow up leads, outsource it or find someone internally that can triage the enquiry and pass it to the best person to help. Take responsibility for looking after your potential customers.
Remember, you only get one chance to make a good first impression.
Improving lead response will help to move the needle, but with specification cycles taking 12-18 months to turn into orders, it's more of a medium-term play, as important as it is.
Slow Pricing Times
Now it's getting interesting. A pricing enquiry is when you get solid buying intent.
Delays in producing a quote, or even missing a tender deadline, is the road to ruin.
Although buyers typically need three quotes, they often ask for five or more. Why? Because they know that some companies won't price a job and they can't wait for the poor performers. It's quicker to press send five times than chase laggards.
Your challenge may be complex, though – recruiting and training more estimators take time and improving pricing tools and software is expensive and slow to deliver.
It's essential to process pricing enquiries quickly and easily. Fixing this problem isn't a quick win. Add it to your key goals for the next 3-6 months, and you'll see results then, but for now, you need a different solution.
Weak Quotation Follow-Up Process
So you've converted a lead, followed it up, and received a quoted pricing enquiry. Now it's time to close.
Remarkably, a lack of quotation follow-up is the problem we see all too often.
Why does this happen? People are easily distracted, and the excitement of the chase overpowers the more monotonous chore of progressing a quote.
Construction is tough. Multiple tenderers are all waiting for a decision on the package they've priced. The wait for their works to begin, budget cuts, competitors trying to break spec and a QS challenging everyone to reduce costs. It all adds to the challenge.
Quoting may feel like you're on the home stretch, but on average, a quote over £25,000 takes 220 days to close (data from Insynth clients over the last three years of closed won deals).
Persistence is required, and the difference in close rate is extraordinary.
Comparing close rates between two businesses, we identified that Company A was following up jobs 3.1 times on average and had a win rate of 3.6%. We knew that this was extremely low, but we wanted to benchmark this against other businesses for contrast
We looked at a client with a robust sales process who diligently progressed every job until it was won or lost.
The difference was clear. On average, Company B followed up quotes 9.2 times and had a win rate of 68% - that is 18.9X better than Company A.
A deeper examination highlighted a higher volume of follow-ups, and they were timely. Follow-up dates were routinely set and met, and the sales team were coached on questions to ask and how to pick up the trail if the tenderer hadn't won the job. They were professionally tenacious in their endeavours, and the results spoke for themselves.
Conclusion
The way that the industry works at the research, specification and enquiry stages has changed irrevocably. It's right to modernise your sales and marketing to harness the power of technology to grow your business.
This investment will fail to deliver the right results if you've got a leaky sales funnel.
Optimising conversion at every stage is mission-critical to an efficient and successful sales and marketing organisation.
Website conversion, lead follow-up, and pricing response times should be priorities. We've helped dozens of companies fix these challenges and grow sustainably and predictably.
But if you're going to fix one thing today, follow up on every quote professionally and tenaciously until it's won or lost. If you don't, you're opening the door for your competitors and leaving money on the table.