Business Software and Your Sales Conversion Rate
The best—and only—way to help your business reach its full potential is to understand it. And this is more than just turning up and doing what you’re told: it means understanding why the business works the way it does, from the day-to-work jobs to the processes that underpin the whole machine.
Your sales process is an example of this. One of the most foundational structures in the whole of your business, it needs anyone working in it to understand it. More than that, anyone involved in it needs to understand how it works, and how it can work better.
The business software you use is central to explaining, monitoring and structuring your sales process. Crucially, it can also be responsible for its effectiveness. This effectiveness has a knock-on effect: if you’re limited by what your technology allows, you’ll also be limiting your successes.
These will come out in your metrics—crucially, in your results for your sales conversion rates. As you want your conversions to be as high as possible, it makes sense to safeguard your methods for converting leads into sales.
So why would visualising your sales process boost your sales conversion rates—and how can your business software help? Here are a few pointers on why it helps you understand, and ultimately improve, your sales conversion rates.
Improving Your Sales Conversion Rate: Why Visualisation?
Having a visual reflection of your sales process provides you with the opportunity to regularly review the tactics you employ that work—and the ones that don’t. Evidenced by reporting from your marketing campaigns; from your website, social media and email activity; you can pinpoint exactly what works. Plus, you can see which prospects are affected, and learn from the opportunity.
How Can You Visualise Your Sales Process?
Join Up Your Data
Multiple sources of data are an issue for many small businesses, and disrupt the workflow of the company—and, by extension, your sales process. A solution to smoothing out this problem is having software that underpins the entire sales process, by compiling all your data in one place and presenting it in an easy to understand way—such as a sales pipeline informed by data in a CRM like popcorn. The combination of these tools, would show you all the data you need, and all the data you didn’t know was helpful to visualising your sales process.
This is the beauty of it: with a CRM, you can find those missed opportunities, allocate tags to your prospects, and progress them along your sales pipelines as you market to them. Every step of your sales process can be visualised, labelled, and—if necessary—adjusted to improve your chances of a sale.
Sales Pipelines
One of the most effective ways to visualise your sales process is by utilising sales pipelines to reflect the customer journey, and the business’ efforts too. This way, you don’t have to monitor a sales process that takes place over multiple sources. Your prospects have a clear and defined journey that can be adjusted if and when it is needed. It can also be used to help inform any actions you take in the future, and how soon or later in the future these actions are.
The Benefits for Your Sales Conversion Rate
Knowledge
As noted above, being informed across your entire sales process helps you make better decisions. It contextualises the data you have, no matter where your prospects are in the sales process. You can see the bigger picture to focus in on the prospects that matter, and increase your chance of a sale—thus increasing your conversion rate.
Having your sales mirrored in your software—such as a CRM like popcorn—brings you closer to the customer buying cycle. As no business is the same, it shows how that customer buying cycle works in your business. The more attuned you are to this cycle, the more likely you are to spot the prospects at the right time to make that sale.
Getting the timing right is important: you need to make an informed decision about when to target, focus or follow up, and this can be the difference between turning a prospect away or securing that sale.
It makes sure, also, that you can catch those you may have left behind. You can see where they are meant to be in your sales process, and what caused them to be left behind. By picking up on these once forgotten leads, you can take the steps towards making sure people don’t get left behind again, and ultimately increase your conversion rate.
Confidence
You’re talking to the prospects that really are interested—you’ll know, because your software has told you as such, like popcorn’s prospect scoring tool. Knowing you have the right information and the right prospect are the tools in the belt you need for the job. If you go in with this confidence, you’re putting yourself in the best possible position to utilise your selling skills.
Collaboration
A perk of having a CRM that visualised your sales process is that it centralises it too. This means anyone who is involved in progressing prospects through your sales process can access it. Having the relevant information in one place will reduce time spent on bringing up other people to speed; it also ensures a more unified approach. This is because once the sales process is visualised, it is much easier to present and relay it as an established policy that others can be trained on and refer to.
Your chances of success increase across the board, as it doesn’t matter who has access to the prospect’s information: with an established protocol, you’re following patterns that lead to success.
All of the above funnels into a more unified, confident approach to visualising your sales process. Instead of being held back by any limitations, your software works with you to simplify your tasks, establish a process and save you time. This is vital for increasing your chances of a sale—and, ultimately, you will see your sales conversion rate rise.
JLP Payroll Services had their data spread over multiple sources and found their sales and marketing process time-consuming and inconsistent. But when they switched to popcorn, they found their fortunes changed. You can discover how popcorn helped JLP Payroll Services increase their sales conversion rate to 6% by reading their story here.
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