Episode 19 – Part 3: How to review your sales process and make it more effective with Simon Bath, PinLocal

The following transcript is autogenerated so may contain errors.

Matt Nally  

Because one of the other aspects I wanted to discuss was how to review your sales process and make it more effective. So you find you’ve got your leads in from whichever lead source? How do you start to understand sort of if you’re performing well, and where do you start looking to sort of to improve that process?

Simon Bath 

The first step and you’d expect me to say this is what we call 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. So absolutely. First stages is CRM and then just make sure that the KPIs are really clearly defined. So understand the In the sales funnel from lead generated through to to job one that might be going through standard sales processes have contacted voicemail left, follow up call, and just understand where the metrics are at each stage, don’t overcomplicate it have very simple buckets that you can keep revisiting. And, 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 you’re going to make a phone call. Without that phone, phone being picked up how many voicemails you’re going to need, how many emails you’re going to send without response, 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 then 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 leads is simply not getting followed up at all, and some are getting overworked, the inconsistencies is, is where it’s really difficult to measure performance. So having a very consistent sales process, which suits the profile of the business that you want to be, is really crucial.

Matt Nally 

Yeah, that’s the consistent part is very important. Because if you really good period are 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, you know, week, two week, three weeks, whatever your lag time is, you suddenly get a little while but it’s all tied back to the busy period where you weren’t following up on the nice broccoli.

Simon Bath 

And by the time you hit the low, you’re too late. Because the alarms because the you know, the inconsistency in lead conversion, or even lead follow up happened 2,3,4 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 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 got that chance to measure it properly.

Matt Nally

Yeah, the fun of years and years and years and years ago when I worked in retail, this is 10 plus years ago, it was there was a bakery section in the store. And you’d often find particular day someone would completely over bake certain items and they go well people love these. And then a you love these but the data doesn’t show anyone buys this time of night. It is looking at the data behind it, it just ties in with what you said, you know, you can think that one lead source is working well, or one job type converts better or one location that works better. But unless you really have that data to look at. You can’t do anything. Yeah.

Simon Bath 

And it’s so hard to do with that CRM so hard to do, you know, we we can deliver our leads, as we do with you guys via API’s straight into platforms, or we can do them via email for people that you know, can only accept and that and it’s very, very difficult and very manual and tends to be one of those processes that I’m going to just get left to one side. Yeah, so it’s 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? Should I decrease the volume? But really until you’ve got that data in front of you, you’re making uninformed decisions?

Matt Nally 

Yeah, so Good point. And I try to avoid being too salesy about survey before any or any talk about when it comes to the podcast, and so on. But you’re right, it is about consistency, a process and access to data. And if you’re if you have very manual processes, when it slows you down, in terms of being able to follow up and to it’s your reporting is then only as good as the data that you’ve put into a spreadsheet. And so if you haven’t captured the exact time the lead came in the exact time you’ve responded the exact time you followed it up, you have you can’t generate those metrics as to how good your sales processes are. Exactly. And it’s and it was very hard to see you performing really well on one type of job, but badly on another. So you know, actually is the lead source not working well is if the job that’s not working well, in a place. So it’s, yeah, there’s this huge benefits to that consistency aspects, you know, the follow ups that you mentioned, and all that type of stuff to get people at the right time. So yeah, how often should you I suppose review your sales process, like a daily, I’m assuming is too much, but I nearly I’d say is also way too infrequent. So when’s the right time?

Simon Bath 

I would say a quarterly review. Again, you know that. We’ve had a strange market for the last few years. And going back to that point of immediate follow up, you know, people picking up the phone pretty much anytime that day, because 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. But again, you’ve got to give it a chance. To, to show data that is there to review. And 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, Aren’t you know what the follow ups that we do between 4pm and 5:30pm, every day are converting at twice the level of the one that’s from one to 2pm. Let’s carry on with that, if you tweak it too much, and have sporadic kind of behaviours around those KPIs, you’ll send yourself mad. So yeah, I would, I would, internally we do ourselves, I would expect to come to review that on a quarterly basis.

Matt Nally 

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, and suddenly go, Oh, I’m gonna change this, and this, and this, and this, and you go, yeah, which variable had the effect? Now, it’s no

Simon Bath 

surprise as well, right? Because, you know, oh, my God, my price is too high, my prices are too low. You know, I’m gonna tweak it again, if you if you’ve made the decision for the price point to be that you based it on good data we should have done. So give it time, give it time to play out, before you make knee jerk reactions, because you’ve had a really bad day or a really good day of conversion.

Matt Nally

Yeah, yeah. And I suppose on that, on that point of conversion, what metrics should you look at when you’re doing a sales process? Because conversions obviously, an easy one to look at? or more obvious one to look at? How detail should you get? Should you do it by location, or job type? Or just conversion rate we look at? Or is it average fee?

Simon Bath

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 gonna give you valuable data at every point. Essentially, you’re looking to build in a total ROI. So come all the way back to invoice, premium 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 it will pretty much look after itself.

Matt Nally 

Yeah, I think I agree with that. And one of the things we tried to build in is a big reporting page that has all of these overlays for lead source and job type and user and it’s nice to be able to capture I think conversion conversion rates, value of of the converted converted jobs average fee. And understand it level two is working really well evaluations working well. Is it building surveys, rather than just a lead source overall? Or, you know, maybe do that, again, by location, you can really drill down if you want to, do you want to refine things, because then you can tailor things in different places as well. Absolutely

Simon Bath 

can become more targeted? You know, if you’re looking to grow your team, you know, bringing in somebody who can do valuations in Birmingham, he’s going to produce a fantastic yield. So yeah, I, 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.