Best Practices for Increasing Your Sales Closure Rate
By Jill Odom
JUST LIKE A HITTER WITH A LOT OF RBIS MAKES HIS TEAM MORE likely to win baseball games, having a salesperson with a higher sales closure rate can help your company succeed. Increasing your sales closure rate requires you to take a look at your sales process and see where things are going awry.
It’s hard to calculate just how much time and money is being lost when chas- ing leads you aren’t able to close. Having a poor sales closure rate can result in forecasting problems, causing you to pay premiums for rentals or equipment and you can end up scrambling to hire enough workers. “It’s hard to quantify, but I can tell you there have been times in my sales experience where somebody didn’t close on time, and we ended up losing tens of thousands of dollars of actual profit on the job,” says Neal Glatt, managing partner of GrowTheBench. “Because we couldn’t perform and we then we got fired and we didn’t get paid.”
KNOW YOUR IDEAL CLIENT The first way to improve your sales closure rate is to focus on selling to your ideal clients. Jud Griggs, a landscape design/build sales and marketing consultant with The Harvest Group, advises every company to determine who their best customers are and where they have the most success. “Instead of having a shotgun ap-
proach, where you’re sending bids out for maintenance or construction work or bidding for design work,” Griggs says. “Focus on what is your
ide-
al client. Where have you had all your success in the past? That’s your sweet spot.”
Glatt adds that by sticking to your tar- get market they are the ones who value what you have to offer and are much more likely to close.
QUALIFY YOUR LEADS You might think the sale always ends up falling through at the end, but you’re actually most likely to lose the sale at the beginning.
“It’s at the beginning, you just don’t know it yet,” Glatt says. “You can learn everything about right at the beginning before you invest any of that time or effort, but we don’t. People don’t ask, ‘What’s your budget?’ People don’t know how and when they’re going to make a decision. They don’t ask those qualifying questions upfront.” Kevin Kehoe, founder of Aspire, says you need to qualify the lead upfront to see if they have the money and the time for the project. When they do, it indi- cates seriousness and you have a high likelihood of not closing if they’re not qualified. When asking about a person’s budget, tact is necessary. You can address it after building some rapport with the client and then explain- ing for a similar project what the price range is and where they see themselves falling.
Glatt says you shouldn’t provide a proposal unless you’re sure you’re
going to win the job. He says good salespeople will have to ask a lot of questions in the beginning but it will help you discover if they are a good fit. “Do you want to be rocking a 20 percent close rate, or do you want to tell 80 percent of people who call you that they don’t get a proposal?” Glatt says. “What’s going to make the difference for you in sales?”
Glatt says sales only fall apart at the end due to one of three things. “Either they didn’t have a compelling reason to buy that you discovered, or they didn’t have the money to buy what you sent out or they didn’t have the ability to make the decision the way they were supposed to,” Glatt says. “It’s always one of those three.”
MAKE A GOOD FIRST IMPRESSION During the qualification phase, it’s also important to make a good first impression. “With the qualifications, it’s not just, did you qualify them to time and money,” Kehoe says. “But did they like you? Did you come across as someone that was not a salesperson?”
“First impressions are everything,” Griggs says. “You want to really dazzle the client. You really want to make sure that they remember you. Again, our goal is to not just be a number, but you want to make a great impression.”
Griggs says it’s important to listen and understand what the prospect wants and advises taking notes to capture their key desires. Kehoe says you can come across as credible rather than pushy by asking good questions.
“I always tell salespeople, ‘Listen, it’s not what you say that sells it, it’s the questions you ask that makes the client feel like they get more in control of the process and that you’re not pushing something on them by describing how great you are, or how much they need it,’” Kehoe says.
BUILD A RELATIONSHIP
Griggs says one of the keys to setting a sale up for success is to build a relationship. Rather than starting off with
20 The Landscape Professional //November/December 2021
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