We hear this a lot, and all I can say is that if you were doing so well, why are you looking to increase your sales?

Increasing your sales is not all about the whole system we deploy, it isn’t even due to the hundreds of things we will cover, it’s all about the 10 things we do for you that you repeat hundreds of times over many months.

We were working with a company recently who we discovered on the fact finding session (where we spend up to a week interviewing, observing, asking questions and getting to know your processes) that the sales people rarely recanvassed a lead or prospect. Many of these leads were for savings and investment advice, but were cast adrift after just one exploratory call or visit. From the data we were provided, each of the 4 advisers actually kept an average of 6 appointments per week.

• Enquiries totalled an average of 11 per month over a six month period (various sources and not including referrals).
• On average just below 1 was recalled after they initially said no or didn’t proceed with any financial planning.
• The company had around 71% success rate once they conducted the “Free Appraisal”.
• The sale per customer value averaged at around £1,335.
• Potential Lifetime of sales with annual management fees etc was around £875 pa.
• Potential lifetime of sales in years was 28.37.
• That’s £26,158 per sale average.
• There were no stats about average future sales on clients.

We suggested that an adviser took the “old leads” from the CRM system for the last 3 months and conducted a customer service satisfaction follow up. We created a script and provided him with some statistical data that was market based and not product based. This data is freely available from the government. We also filled in with some feedback questions and asked for rating on certain aspects of the service.

We used market data such as; ‘In the “Early insights from the Over 50s Lifestyle Study, Great Britain: 1 March 2022”, of the 1,870 people who left work or lost their job due to the pandemic, 36% cited flexible working as the most important aspect of choosing a new job, followed by working from home (18%) and something that fits around caring responsibilities (16%). Basically for these people, their lifestyle had been disrupted through no fault of their own, combined with other circumstances.

‘In the “Changing trends and recent shortages in the labour market, UK: 2016 to 2021” from the ONS, younger workers (aged under 35 years) were more transient in the workforce, with a high number moving from a job or business and into unemployment in Quarter 2 2020 at the start of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Additionally, The movement of workers into redundancy (including voluntary redundancies) in Quarter 2 2021 nearly doubled for those aged 55 years and over, compared with the previous year; early retirement also saw an increase during this period.’ How do you think many of them faired or perhaps they just made do?’

Never let the customer be told the conclusion, let them make their own. You want them to buy into the idea. No one like to be lectured.

Over the next week, the adviser called all of the leads and managed to get through to 22 of them with another 2 calling back after their holiday.

• Of the 22, 7 had already done business with another provider.
• Of the remaining 15, 4 asked to be called in the new year or after a payrise period; essentially requested a call back in the distant future.
• 4 asked to book appointments to discuss their situation again/revisit previous recommendations.
• 6 asked to be removed from the company’s marketing database.
• 5 asked to be placed on a newsletter mailing list.

Even though the basic stats were a little sketchy and not well maintained, through this exercise, we established there were;

• 7 lost sales because they were cast adrift.
• 6 to call back/will call back in the medium term.
• 5 begging to be nurtured and loved, by the newsletter
• 4 potential sales at £106,400 value.

So let’s look at some stats by Hubspot in 2022
Sales Prospecting Statistics

1. Top sellers spend an average of 6 hours every week researching their prospects. (Crunchbase)
2. Need and budget are the two biggest factors in whether a prospect connects with a rep. (RAIN Group)
3. 64% of sales professionals who cross-sell say email follow-up is the most effective cross-selling strategy (HubSpot)
4. 60% of customers say no four times before saying yes. (Invesp)
5.48% of salespeople never even make a single follow up attempt. (Invesp)
6.80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls whereas. (Invesp)
7. 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up call. (Invesp)
8. The best time to make sales calls is within an hour of receiving their initial inquiry. (Callhippo)
9. Organisations that don’t cold call* experienced 42% less growth than those who used the tactic. (Crunchbase)

* Cold Calling is banned in regulated firms, but with our compliance know how, have ways in the SMS to counter that problem

Sources: https://ons.gov.uk
https://www.crunchbase.com/
https://www.rainsalestraining.com/
https://www.invespcro.com/
https://callhippo.com/