August 29

0 comments

How Incremental Improvements Bring Monumental Increase

By Michael Q. Pink

August 29, 2014

improve, increase sales, metrics, Outer Court, sales process

So last time we talked about how NOT to grow your market… Now, I want to begin talking about three different approaches to increasing your success. Think of them as levels such as 30, 60 and 100 fold. Similar to Outer Court, Inner Court and Holy of Holies.

success businessman with business growing graph cloud

The Outer Court of the Tabernacle of Moses was illuminated by natural light and thus represents naturally observable practices. I call this, Level 1. When functioning at this level, you have the potential to get a 30-fold return on your efforts. This is not a literal number but it does suggest that a very good return is possible.

Level 1 is where you master the transactional, technical aspects of business. You pay close attention to the numbers. You evaluate potential. You determine the metrics necessary for success for every step of every process of your business. If you are in sales, you will identify your unique sales process and master that.

Most sales folks and business owners have never clearly defined their sales process. They have some fuzzy idea of making calls, telling their story and closing the sale. No wonder they struggle. Good level 1 management segregates the calls being made into categories. Using the parable of the sower for a model, you learn to identify your good ground prospects and invest your time, treasure and talent there.

Even the initial call is strategic. What is the goal of the first point of contact? Is it to set up a second call, send a sample, arrange an appointment? The point is to have a specific goal in mind. That’s called an “advance”. Then measure the number of calls relative to the number of advances made. That’s your conversion rate for that step.

Conversions Word Selling Team Working Together Increase SalesYou can drill down. If your conversion rate is low, maybe you are asking too much from the first step. You don’t cold call to sell a house, but you might cold call to invite folks to a very special open house. If your conversion rate is good, then you should ask, “Compared to what?”

So you’re getting a 25% conversion rate. What if you tweaked your initial interaction with the prospect? Is 30% possible? How about 50%? The point is that if you want to experience the upper end of the 30-fold promise, you need to become an expert at defining and implementing, measuring and improving every step of your process. Here’s why…

Let’s say you have a 5-step process that goes something like this…
  1. Online marketing generates an inquiry (100 per month)
  2. The inquiry generates a sales call from you (yields 60 connects)
  3. The sales call results in a needs analysis  (yields 30 needs analysis)
  4. The analysis results in a presentation (yields 24 presentations)
  5. The presentation results in a sale. (yields 8 sales)

If your average sale were $10,000, your monthly sales volume with those conversion rates at each step would be $80,000. Not bad.

If you will focus on slightly improving each clearly defined step of your process incrementally, you can generate a huge increase in sales. If in the above example, you increased your conversion percentage on every level by just 10%, (i.e.: instead of a 33% conversion rate in step 5, you experience a 36.3% conversion rate) your sales would increase by nearly 80%.

Here’s what a 10% increase in each conversion rate looks like…
  1. Online marketing generates an inquiry (110 per month)
  2. The inquiry generates a sales call from you (yields 73 connects)
  3. The sales call results in a needs analysis  (yields 40 needs analysis)
  4. The analysis results in a presentation (yields 35 presentations)
  5. The presentation results in a sale. (yields 13 sales)

If your average sale were now $11,000, (a 10% increase per sale) your monthly sales volume with those conversion rates at each step would be $143,000! A 15% increase on each step would increase your sales to $183,000 instead of just $80,000. That’s a whopping increase of 130%! That’s how incremental improvements bring monumental increase!

So here’s the takeaway…

Break your sales process down into as many steps as make sense. Focus on steps in your process where there is room for improvement. Modify your tactical efforts in each step until you get the desired level of increase for that step. Bear in mind, the underlying sales philosophy is to do what’s right and best for the customer, so don’t cross that line.

Maybe you change your words, the quality of materials, the time of day you call, the choice of day you call, the color of your marketing piece, etc. There are endless tactical things you can test. But if you will master your process, you will be able to dramatically increase your results and keep way ahead of your competition.

Level 2 multiplies what you achieve in level 1, so the better you are at level 1, the greater the increase will be when you apply what I will show you about level 2.

If you are not signed up to be notified of our upcoming MPI Christian Business Institute where I teach this kind of thing in detail within the context of Biblical truth and natural law, do that now. It’s an incredible program we intend to launch in September. It’s not free but it’s very reasonable and the value is incredible. You owe it to yourself to check it out. You can even make money by being part of it.

Michael Q. Pink

About the author

Michael is America's leading authority on applying Biblical Wisdom and Natural Law to sales and business and has authored 19 books including The Bible Incorporated, Selling Among Wolves and God's Best Kept Secrets. Using that knowledge, he has helped thousands of professionals and entrepreneurs experience radical transformation in their lives and careers, including helping a start-up with 3 struggling sales reps turn the corner and become the 16th fastest growing company on the INC 500 list. 

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}

Join My Exclusive Notification Group

Be the First To Get Notified Of New Blog Posts

>