How to increase sales and profits without spending a cent!
I didn't hear anything called "conversion rate." You might have but do you measure it all the time, or do you just guess what it might be?
If you don't know what conversion rate means you lose the strongest existing strategy in the world to increase sales, without spending the center. In addition, by increasing your conversion rate, your net earnings always rise!
So what is the conversion rate?
The conversion rate is the difference between the number of calls, entries, or calls your business and then the number of calls that end up buying. For example, if you have 10 phone calls to your business and take their names and phone over time, you simply track how many have spent their money with you. So if you have 3 people buying from you, the conversion rate will be 30% or 3 out of 10.
This simple measurement changes the lives of business owners when they see its strength. If you don't know your conversion rate and "guess" it's about 50% I guarantee you're wrong! Almost everyone thinks the conversion rate is higher than it is. The reason is that the people you're talking to say they'll come back and buy later or they seem very interested in buying often don't. But you don't know that if you don't measure all the queries because you assume they were bought.
When you measure your conversion rate, be prepared for a shock. I worked with retailers who thought it was 75% and found it was 38%. I worked with service companies that I thought were 50% and we found them 13%.
They get a little depressed when they realize it's only 13%, but I'm excited! This is because it is impossible to double the conversion rate by 50%, but with 13% you can triple it and still have room for improvement!
Did you know that increasing your conversion rate relatively increases business volume and net profit? This means that if you increase your conversion rate by 50% (e.g. from 24% to 36%), you've just increased your sales volume by 50% as well! That's because you get customers paying 50% more than you have now. You can increase the conversion rate, business number, and profit without spending a cent on advertising or promotion.
So how do you measure it? First of all, you need 2 to 3 pieces of information about everyone who relates to your business. Things like their name, their phone number, and what their inquiry was about.
This then gives you information for your reference; To find out how many people ended up buying that that contacted your business. With your business, it can take days before you can calculate inquiries for customers. For some service companies, you may need to wait a month from the date of inquiry to purchase due to the time it takes for people to make a decision.
You will notice that your conversion rate will be different for each of your employees. Why is that? Good question. But when you realize the difference, you can do something about it, but even measure it how you can do anything about it?
So now, in the magical question, how do you improve your conversion rate?
There are at least 80 ways! Do you want to know the best of them? Here they are...
1. Learn DISC profiles. DISC profiling should be the most popular way to understand people who exist, however at work, it is the most powerful tool you can learn and use. DISC is an insight into 4 significant differences in people's behavior. When you know DISC profiles, you understand that some people want to be friends with the person they buy from, while others find friendly salespeople annoying and do not buy from them. Some people (about 50%) make all sales decisions very quickly, usually immediately. While 50% of people always want to think about it, usually over a day or two. DISC is something I teach all my customers and everyone who learns from me increases their sales (sales volume and profits) by 20% -300% in weeks!
2. Provide guarantees in writing. Everyone has certain anxiety about separation from money, so the guarantee helps overcome this anxiety and helps people make confident decisions. What can you ensure in writing that you have not submitted now? How about not leaving the mess if you're in the service business? How about being perfectly happy to buy you will gladly allow a refund? Retailers often don't want a refund, so they're afraid of dozens of potential customers for very few who want a refund. (To learn more about DISC, see the article "How to build an outlet in 7 seconds" by Tim Stokes on www.ezinearticles.com)
3. Make your work look unique. This is again a powerful tool as if you "look" unique or different, you stop losing sales to price shoppers. It's not hard to do that when you use warranties like the one above, it makes you very unique!
4. Learn body language. Body language is responsible for 55% of what you communicate before you open your mouth! Everyone has heard of it, but how many people are using it? Almost nothing! Go read a book about it and try it. Body language is a form of flattery and buys people from people they love or associate with.
5. Try different words you use to greet people face to face or over the phone. Retailers are known for saying things that provoke "no thanks just for searching." That's because they prepared this response with what they said. Try to say different words about greeting and see what happens. It's the same on the phone, if you end your greeting by "talking by name," you often get people who think you're a puppet and reply "I'd like to talk to somebody about..." In other words, you can't help me, can you get someone who can? Try not to use speech and see what happens.
Have you started getting the photo, there are dozens of ways to improve what you're doing now with your conversion rate. You first have to measure it before you can improve it. Collect them over a day, then a week, and then a month. When you do that you will have a strong key performance indicator.
Working with employer conversion rates, I got dozens and dozens of great profit improvements in weeks and months. My record is a blind manufacturer whose conversion rate was 3.5% and then after 6 months we took it to 75% and that was with a 35% price increase along the way! What percentage increases in profit? I don't know, but it's huge!
I did the same with a retailer. Their conversion rate was 68% and using a sales system I wrote with them, they reached the 100% conversion rate the week we started using it. It never dropped below 82% again.
If you don't increase your conversion rate, marketing rarely makes you a good return on profit, or enough to pay for itself through profit from sales from the promotion. When you double conversion rates, you double your sales volume and advertising responses, so you can run your ads by half which also saves you profit.
I'll leave you with this idea... You can't improve something if you don't measure it. Measurement is the secret to all your success in working.