There’s an ongoing debate in among sales managers about which is more important: Do you need more leads or do you need to better qualify your leads to increase your sales production? The answer is you need both! If your team is doing better of qualifying leads, they are working on deals that have a better chance of closing, although they have now filtered out the non-qualified which may result in leaving the cupboards a little bare. After all, a lead with no sale isn’t worth anything at all, but it is hard to close deals with no leads. It might be easy to say that they’re equally important, but to do so is to miss the point of the argument. Leads and closes work together so they cannot be analyzed separately.
Take a close ratio using baseball as an example. How many “at bats” does a player need to get a hit?” Everyone on the team has a different batting average, the same as everyone on a sales team has a different closing percentage. Understanding how many people each rep needs to talk to is critical. If a sales rep knows they have a 20% close ratio, they would expect to close two out of every ten deals. That’s pretty good. But if their close ratio is 5%, they would close half a deal out of every ten deals. That may be a problem because it’s pretty challenging to close half a deal. They would want to improve their close ratio which they could do by generating higher quality leads.
Are you maximizing your team’s close potential? Ask yourself the following questions.
Once you have maximized your team’s close potential, it is time to evaluate the necessary volume. Let’s assume it takes ten qualified leads to get five sales opportunities to close one deal. How many leads will a sales rep need to sort through in order to get a qualified lead? And how many deals does each sales rep need to close per week, month, and year in order to cover your costs? Now you can begin to understand how many leads your marketing and sales teams need to generate and tie incentives to those numbers.
Next, you need to evaluate your sales team’s time. Do you have enough reps to generate the activity needed to meet your goals? Are those reps working efficiently? Studies show that only 37% of a sales rep’s time is actually spent selling. Do you have systems in place to set your team up for success or are they struggling under the weight of manual processes? It won’t matter if the marketing team generates 500 leads a day if your team only has time to call 20. And that is only the tip of the iceberg.
In short, leads vs. closes is a chicken and egg equation. You can’t have one without the other. Instead of trying to figure out where to put your focus, dedicate some time to optimizing the full process from lead to close. The answers you seek may very well be in the data and if the data is too overwhelming bring in a third party to help with your reporting. CLS knows just who to call.
Investors, employees, marketing teams, and others will ask you at some point who your target audience is. If you can’t answer that question, you have a problem—and a lot of businesses can’t. So how do you start to figure out an answer?
According to Indeed, a target audience is “the demographic of consumers who are most likely to buy or be interested in your products or services.” These are the people your marketing team is going to try and reach, the people your designers are building your products for, the people who are going to give you money because they’re the ones who actually like what you’re offering.
The same article from Indeed gives this list of attributes that will help you define exactly who it is you’re trying to reach.
For example, if your target audience is 18- to 24-year-olds, that’s too vague. How about 18- to 24-year-old women? Even better might be 18- to 24-year-old single women working in the service industry in the Tri-County area? Now that’s a target audience!
On the other hand, while a specific target audience is helpful, you don’t want it to be too specific. 18- to 24-year-old single women in the Tri-County area waitressing as they finish college and roller skating on the weekends is going to be far too much. You might find three customers within your target if that’s your MO.
Your target audience can also be specific to something like a hobby, such as guitar players or volleyball hobbyists. A fourteen-year-old learning to play guitar and a sixty-year-old who has been playing since he was fourteen might both need a tuning app that has a metronome. Beginning guitar players might be a more helpful category if you’re selling how-to books or lessons, but it depends on what you’re selling, which brings us to our next point.
When figuring out your target audience, you should always begin by looking at what exactly you’re selling. What needs does it fulfill? Who will it help? You’ll need to identify a pain point that is repeated in people’s lives, and how your product fixes that pain point. Then, the job of your marketing team is to tell the people who are experiencing that specific problem in their life (that’s your target audience!) that you’ve got a solution. If your product meets the need, it might even sell enough to define your target audience for you.
As your business grows, do everything you can to keep track of who is buying your product. Customer surveys about their demographics will be immensely helpful for defining and refining your target audience. Once you know who is using your product—whether it was your original intended audience or not—you can tailor your marketing to appeal to them and capitalize on the market you’re creating.
Sometimes the hardest things to see are those things that are closest to us. In business, executives may be so closely involved with a particular structure or system within a company that dangerous blind spots are formed and outside eyes are necessary to diagnose and treat the unseen problems.
Maybe you know your business has some pain points. Maybe you think things are running smoothly but it’s time to get some fresh eyes on the systems that are already in place; time to make sure things are the best they can be. If that’s you, consider hiring a business strategist. If you’re not sure what that is, here’s a brief rundown:
Business strategists have a knack for noticing how all the little parts of a business come together. They can examine whether or not the intimacies of the company align with the mission statement, target audience, and its place in the market. If it fits, great! If not, why not? What needs to change? How is this or that deterring or assisting the company in accomplishing its vision? A business strategist can look at the little details to see whether they’re helping meet the goals of the company as a whole and, if not, what needs to be adjusted in order to make that happen.
A business strategist will do more than figure out what doesn’t work. He or she may begin by shedding light on pain points, but their primary role is to provide solutions. An effective business strategist will help you figure out why things aren’t working and how to fix them. They’ll help you come up with solutions first, then a plan to make the solutions actually happen, seeing things through from start to finish.
One Synnovatia article highlights some unique skills that business strategists have that make their services relevant. The proposals they offer are informed by an understanding of current trends and industry standards, which make the path forward clear, focused, and relevant. Business strategists aren’t throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping something sticks, but expertly wielding knowledge and experience as a precise surgical tool to help your business do what needs to be done.
When you sign with CLS, you’ll be introduced to your Chief Strategist, who will guide you through the process of building a roadmap and identifying your business needs. Your strategist will help determine your company goals and assess the status of your business from top to bottom, identifying gaps between where you think you are and where the market says you are. Next, we’ll design a strategic and efficient growth plan to close the distance between where you are and where you’re trying to go.
If you’re looking to scale up (and who isn’t?), CLS can help. Drop us a line at 855-917-3165 or email info@clevelstrategy.com. We’ll see you at the top in no time!