How to Increase Revenues and Shorten Your Sales Cycle

Check out this case study about a 10-million dollar company in the coach, training and certification business. They had 3 specific challenges when they contacted me and said they needed to resolve them:

#1: They were getting too many leads to be able to follow up.

They were actually getting about 3000 leads a month, and they could only follow up with about 300 or 400 of those leads a month. And they were like, picking needles out of a haystack trying to find out which ones were the best.

#2: They had a 46 week sales cycle.

That’s a really, really long sales cycle in anybody’s business, but they were successful and they were doing a lot of good things.

#3:  Their team was beyond capacity.

They couldn’t cope with all the leads, they couldn’t figure out which ones were the right leads, et cetera.

Let me just dive in and tell you the strategy that we came up with to resolve all of these things, and grow their revenues…

So, this is the first thing we did: Number one, how do we get the 3000 leads and find the ones that are most qualified to speak to? So, we did a simple thing. They had a lead magnet on the front end, they were getting people to opt in for a specific PDF to understand more about the coaching certification business. And then, they were driving people straight to a conversation from there. They were asking for phone numbers on the front end, driving people straight to a conversation.

So, I put a qualification page in between that. People would opt in, then we invited them to a conversation on another page, then we put a qualification page after that. In that process, we managed to find the crème of the crop, the people that we wanted to speak to, the people that were ready now, the people that had the money, and the people that were ready to go.

They had two teams – a booking team and a sales team. The booking team was the team that was overwhelmed, because out of these 3000 leads, they didn’t know which ones to call, and it was just like, slug, slug, slug, slug, slug, not knowing who was going to be right to send to the sales team…or sift and sort through that list, not knowing if they were getting to the right ones because there were 2700 plus leads that they weren’t getting to during the course of any given month. And you can imagine, that’s all piling on, backlogging over time.

Once we implemented the changes, the booking team had the most highly qualified leads raise their hands, tell us specifically what they’re interested in, when they’re interested in moving forward, and also whether they qualify from a monetary standpoint, which is really awesome.

The booking team had a much better success rate in booking qualified appointments for the sales team. Now, we’ve got the highest quality leads coming on the front end. The sales team is saying, “great, I’ve got less. I may have slightly less appointments, but I’ve actually got more highly qualified people,” which is an absolute key in any business, by the way. Driving volume, you can kill the business. I’m not saying you shouldn’t drive volume, but if you drive too much volume of the wrong leads, you could kill the business.

By understanding who your ideal client is, who’s the best buyer for you, you can step in, make that distinction and have those people go to the sales team. That makes for a much happier sales team. They make much more money, and they make sales a whole lot faster.

So, in the end, this is what happened: They end up having their best four months ever. Their revenues grew about 20%, but what was really most significant is they reduced their sales cycle from 46 weeks to 13 weeks. What a huge transformation for that business! Now they know when they’re spending money on paid advertising, they can recoup the money a whole lot faster, therefore, they can grow. Now they can grow, but they were stuck at this level.

Anyway, that’s the case study I bring to you today. If you got value from this, please like this, share this, and in the comments below, just let me know what value you take away from this. And then, also let me know what’s the specific challenge that you’re dealing with that you might want a resolution for.

If you’d like to see how much revenue is waiting to be harvested in your company, then let me know more about your business and if I feel I can help you we’ll chat.

I look forward to speaking to you again soon, thank you.