After a unique selling position of your client, your attention turn to the use of current marketing efforts.
This area of ??marketing is often overlooked and ignored by most business owners. Taking this approach will give you leverage and unique position because it will focus on providing marketing assets currently available to businesses and not always focus on acquiring new customers.
Two critical pieces of information
There are two pieces of information or data as a consultant, you should know.
Exchange rates or potential customers or clients
Average ticket price or the average amount of the initial purchase
Consider # 1: The price for potential customers or clients.
Business owners spend less time figuring out their closing rate or conversion rate of all the prospects being generated who then become customers or clients. This closing rate is found in every type of business, regardless of industry. A professional will market and from that, generate prospects. He or she should know who the prospects are and how many are becoming clients. A retail store should track the number of people coming into the store and the number of transactions that occur. This can be computed to a conversion rate or closing rate.
Certainly, any organization with an outside sales force has paid more attention to this than most other businesses. But even these businesses will often overlook the power and tremendous leverage available through sales training and increasing the conversion rate.
The reason this statistic and the effort to improve it is so important is because the profitability of this increase is tremendous.
For example, consider a medical doctor in the diet business. This doctor had patients that subscribed to this diet program on a monthly basis. What the doctor did not know, however, was how many calls were coming in on the telephone.
A sales person was hired to take incoming phone calls. Names and addresses were recorded. Information was sent. A follow-up call was made to set an appointment with the doctor.
This one activity alone increased sales 25%. But the important thing to understand is the tremendous profitability increase. The doctor was already paying for a yellow page ad. The doctor was already paying for a receptionist. We started this effort using the receptionist and then found that enough prospects could be generated and clients converted or prospects converted, to justify an additional sales person.
This increased the return on the doctor’s yellow page ad tremendously. This is what is meant by leverage. There was no new marketing expense incurred except for the hiring of the sales person whose job was created because of additional sales. A retail store that knows the conversion rate of those coming into the store and becoming customers can train sales people in the art of selling. If these sales people are trained on an on-going basis, their closing rate can improve dramatically. There again, profitability increases significantly. The store has already paid for the sales people. So without any further investment, profits and revenues increase dramatically when the closing rate is raised from 30% to 40%.
Selling is a critical component of marketing. Good sales training can create tremendous increases in both revenues and profitability.
