Biz Tips: How you can increase your sales by going from the top to the bottom
GROWTH:
How you can increase your sales by going from the top to the bottom
What went wrong?
This is the first question that every marketer asks after a campaign. KPIs, goals, metrics- everything seems to fail you. What do you do when you hit this wall?
Here’s something I have been using personally for sometime.It’s a foolproof method that will definitely give you more clarity about where you’re going right and where you aren’t.
Let’s do something different, shall we?
Imagine if every prospect we spoke to became our friends. People who always hit us up even when we’re offline.
So let’s reverse engineer our revenue goals. I keep things simple, owing to my limited knowledge. Here is one formula I use, and hope this will satisfy the inquisitiveness and complexities about generating leads.
Step 1: Reversing the sales funnel
I consider 6 major elements of a sales funnel, and these are:
a) Engagement: Leads from our online activities
b) MQLs or Market Qualified Leads: Promising leads based on certain metrics and KPIs: buyer persona and our goals for a certain activity. This is the first prominent sign to modify our engagement methods in case the wrong audience starts interacting with us.
c) SQLs or Sales Qualified Leads: Condensed list of prospects from MQLs. People to whom we can have appointments, conversations with to understand their challenge better.
d) Discovery: Sales team gets down to hardcore pitching.
e) Proposal: Sharing of our process framework, SOPs, SOWs, quotation, negotiation etc.
f) Win: Sales team closes the deal.
Step 2: Calculation of conversion rate per stage
This step is just another way to gauge if we are headed in the right direction.
a) Conversion rate per stage:
For example, if we have 100 MQLs, and only 20 move to SQL stage, MQL conversion rate is: 20/100=20% But this is a generic approach, and you can’t get down to the specifics.
I use lead scoring to combat this, or weightage analysis by assigning a score based on decision making authority, engagement level, intent to buy, demographics and budget or willingness to spend. This kind of predictive lead scoring can be done by a CRM.
Step 3: Forecasting
This is where reverse engineering happens. This makes it easy to set a quota for each stage aligned with overall revenue goal. This makes it easier to focus on the stages that we might lag behind in.
Before we start to reverse engineer, we should have a clear picture of average sales price. This will help us to reverse engineer using our revenue goals as the starting point. Let’s start with Win.
Example:
Revenue goal: Rs. 10,00,000
Average sales per lead: Rs. 1,00,000
No. of Win deals needed: 10,00,000/1,00,000= 10
No. of Win deals needed: 10
Conversion rate from proposal to win stage: 20% (say)
No. of Proposals to Win leads needed: 10/20%= 50
Now, time to move upward.
No. of Proposal to Won leads: 10 / 20% = 50
- Conversion rate Discovery to Proposal: 25% (say)
- No. of Discovery to Proposal leads: 50/ 25% = 200
- Conversion rate SQL to Discovery: 30% (say)
- No. of SQL to Discovery leads: 200 / 30% = 666.667
- Conversion rate MQL to SQL: 70% (say)
- No. of MQL to SQL leads: 666.667 / 70% = 952.38
- Conversion rate Engaged to MQL: 10% (say)
- No. of Engaged to MQL leads: 952.38 / 10% = 9,523.8 total no. of leads
This framework, like any other works with trial and error based on a ton of other extrinsic factors. But at least we know how far or near we will be from our goals and objectives, and also when exactly when we’ll need to celebrate.
Don’t just stand there, applaud! If you ever need a friendly arm around you during your next campaign, you can always drop me a hi here . I’m happy to help!
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How you can increase your sales by going from the top to the bottom was originally published in Marketing And Growth Hacking on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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