Most people in sales have heard the phrase “it’s a numbers game”. But have you ever stopped to think about exactly WHAT numbers are important and how to play the game? It’s a bit more involved than just throwing more enquiries at your sales team.
Let’s take a closer look at the numbers game using mortgage sales as an example. You can apply the same approach to any product or service, no matter how simple or complex. You can use this and boost your sales massively…
Your Sales Funnel…
You can think of the sales process as a funnel that starts with lots of enquiries going in the top and ends with sales at the bottom. Here’s a diagram of an example funnel for how to sell mortgages
There are a number of steps that have to complete before you get paid. By helping you to understand your numbers, we can figure out which areas need work and then improve them. If you’re not in the mortgage game, spend a bit of time to figure out the steps in your business and then apply the same principles.
Leads – any kind of enquiry from a client showing interest in your products and services. This could be over the phone, via the Internet or personal introduction. If you meet clients face to face, there’s another step here which is “book meeting” before you can do the fact find.
Fact-Find – the part of your sales conversation where you find out about your client’s circumstances and what they want. Think of this as understanding their needs.
Quotes – you provide details of the products that fit your client’s needs.
Applications & Insurances – when your client decides to go ahead and apply for the mortgage, plus any insurances you sell on top too.
Completions – when your client’s new mortgage comes through, you get paid (well, soon after anyway!)
How To Sell More By Playing The Numbers Game…
If you don’t currently know how many leads you need in the top of your funnel to get to a client at the bottom of your funnel, you can’t play the numbers game. Once you know your own numbers from the top to the bottom, you can put a target figure for every day on each layer in the funnel.
If you want to know how to sell more, start by measuring your sales funnel today and find out how many leads you need to put in to make a sale.
Another great thing you learn from measuring your own conversion rates (i.e. the success rate % when you move from step to step) is which parts of your sales process need more work to improve your overall success.
Using this approach, one mortgage advisor more than doubled his sales within just 2-3 months. He set targets and kept track of his numbers and didn’t stop working until he’d achieved his targets in terms of fact-finds, quotes and applications. In fact he had several other measures and targets, like how many got to Decision In Principle. Being determined to hit these gave him tremendous results.
If you want to put this into practice in your business and you would appreciate some help, fill in my contact form for a no obligation, totally free informal chat with me.