Making More Sales – Even If Your Sales Process is Virtually Non-Existant 

Recently, I worked with a potential client who had a very basic sales process. They would get leads from LinkedIn or hand out business cards at a conference - simply inviting people to schedule an appointment.

Looking at this process (which some would call a "funnel") the process looks something like this:

(numbers are hypothetical)

If you’ve been paying attention to some of my lessons, you can see a couple of problems here.  No follow-up being the most obvious. However, the most immediate thing is that this client is very busy and will talk to anyone.  That’s grand, but it also means that their calendar gets filled up - fast. Perspective clients may have to wait over a week before they can talk to them.

By the time they talk, many of the clients have moved on and the sale has been lost.  

The most important thing we can do here - with existing traffic - is to talk to more qualified leads sooner rather than having them hang out on the calendar for a couple of weeks. 

Here's the game plan.

First, we create two session types in the calendar system - one for “qualified leads” and the second, standard, for everyone else (using the existing calendar is fine).  

For qualified leads, I want to block off a few hours every day for these only calls only - ensuring people get access to the appointments quickly. During this time, we can expect to be either talking to qualified prospects with a higher chance of closing, OR have some time to do other work - specifically going after more qualified prospects. See where I'm going with this?

Using JotForm, we would put a short qualification form asking for some basic information before sending the prospect to the calendar (and, of course, adding their contact info to our automated systems).  

Depending on the prospects  answer to the qualifying questions, the prospect would be sent to a different calendar: a reasonable chance of being able to talk to my client in the next day or two if the prospect is qualified, or, as it currently is … waiting for the next available slot.

The benefits of this system include:

1. The client is closing more sales, faster, because qualified leads are being bumped to the front of the line - better efficiency.
2. The client has dedicated time each day and is either closing qualified prospects or working on getting qualified prospects - more intensity on the core business. 
3. There’s built in mechanism for followup - which would be the next thing we’d want to do (remember, one thing at a time) 

The downside? Unqualified prospects may drop out due to  having more steps, and they may have to wait a little longer to get an appointment. That’s it. 

Here’s an updated process map:

Here’s how it works:

Leads go to a page on your website that houses a “smart”, mobile friendly Jotform application form.  We’ll ask Name, Email, and questions to determine if they are ready to commit and level of interest. 

Note: See all the red “no’s”?  Those are people who drop off part-way through. Using email automation (I recommend ActiveCampaign as the CRM) we’ll follow up with those leads, putting them back in the system and / or sending additional, relevant offers. That’s a topic for another post. Ad retargeting is an option as well.

For those that are “ready to go” (guess is about 20%, we’ll have to see what the number really is), we’ll send them to the urgent, qualified lead calendar so we can talk to them quickly. Alternately, the prospect could get a callback within an hour -- greatly increasing close rate.

For anyone who fills out the form but is not fully qualified, they go to the primary calendar just as it works today- they’ll get scheduled as time allows.

Since this process has more steps, there may be additional dropout.  We'll mitigate that by adding in additional followup, and the reality is I wouldn't worry about it.  It'll be unqualified prospects that drop out, potentially increasing close rate with fewer calls.

To Implement:

1. Create a new “Event Type” for Book Calls (qualified leads) in Acuity
2. Create a Jotform for the application form.  Setup logic in the form that will redirect people to the correct calendar page (qualified or standard).  
3. Create a page on one of your sites to host the application, copy & paste the embed code.  Ensure the facebook pixel and tracking code is working.
4. Start sending people to the form URL rather than directly to the calendar url.

The intent here is that we’ll start getting qualified leads scheduled more quickly. We'll also be able to get contact information for people who drop out before completing the scheduling, and be able to re-target interested people with relevant content videos.

Not done yet .… once that’s in place, we’d have the core offer to start expanding on:

1. Put in additional followup - email and / or text at every step.
2. Start showing prospects additional content through retargeting
3. Add additional automated offers into the system
4. Increase intensity by sending traffic from other places (referrals, ads, etc) to the process - knowing that every prospect is being followed up with.

As you can see, even if you have a very simple sales process, your business will probably benefit from even minor updates such as this.

Have a sales process where you’d like to get more leads? Contact me at templeclients.com and we’ll setup a time to audit your process and see where we can make some improvement in either efficiency, intensity - or both.