No matter how many people are pounding on your door to talk to you about your service, you won’t make a cent unless you can convert those prospects into customers. Your bank account is stuck at a big ZERO until you start converting.
Chances are good that you can convert some of your prospects already. You’ve done a great job when you’ve got even a few of your prospects making the switch.
Let’s increase those numbers. Increasing your conversion rates puts more money in your bank account without doing any more marketing ? no matter whether you’re improving your sales appointments or your sales page.
During today’s challenge, we will improve your conversion skills and walk through specific actions that will increase your conversion rates.
Convert Your Sales Appointments
Have a service or product that you sell using sales appointments? Read this section!
Before we can improve your sales appointment process, we need to check how you’re doing right now. We need to figure out your current sales ratio ? the ratio between how many prospects you talk to and how many prospects convert into paying customers.
The Sales Ratio Formula
(how many prospects you talk to) ????
——————————————– = sales ratio
(how many prospects convert into customers)
Let’s go through this calculation step by step:
- Go find the last 20 prospects you spoke with during your sales appointments. (Can’t find 20? Use the last 10 ? your numbers won’t be as accurate, but you’ll still have a starting point.)
- Figure out how many of those prospects purchased your product or service.
- Divide the first number by the second number. Now you’ve got your sales ratio.
With your sales ratio in hand, let’s work on increasing that ratio.
Increase Your Sales Ratio
I’ve interviewed some amazing millionaire salesmen ? and they all have something in common. Each of these successful salesman have a process that they’ve developed and reminded over the years. For most salesmen, the process looks identical.
The sales process follows this outline:
- Warm up
- Set expectations
- Find prospects’ pain
- Wrap up
- Close the sale
Let’s break up each of these steps.
Warming Up
During the first part of your sales appointment, you need to find connection points that make your prospect feel comfortable with you.
Setting Expectations
Early on in your call, you need to go over exactly what will happen during the call. Be precise.
Here’s a sample script for going through your expectations for the call:
?Do you still have about 30-45 minutes??
?Yes.?
?Awesome! So this is how these calls normally go: I?m going to have a bunch of questions for you. You might feel like I?m bombarding you with questions, but I really want to understand what you need ? and I can?t know if this might be a good fit until I get a really good idea of your business and what you need. Then I?ll open it up at the end and you can ask me whatever questions you want. Does that make sense??
?Yep.?
?Awesome. And at the end, if I have a program or service that seems like a great fit for you, then I?ll tell you about it. If I don?t, I?ll try to direct you to something else or introduce you to someone else that can help. That way you have a next step either way. Make sense??
?Yes.?
?So if I do have something that fits and you think it fits you too, great! Tell me! And I?ll explain the next steps. If you don?t think it?s a good fit, please tell me that too. I want you to be able to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ at the end of the call either way. And don?t worry about saying no, we?ll still be friends either way! Are you ok with that??
?Yes.?
?Perfect! So let?s dive in??
Finding Prospects’ Pain
During your sales appointments, your goal is to find out the pain points your prospects are facing. With that information, you can make sure that you’re offering prospects a product or service that fits their needs.
Let’s go over some sample questions:
- What do you struggle with the most?
- How is this problem affecting you?
- How much is this problem costing you? (Focus on finding the dollar amounts or hours your prospects are losing. This technique is called ‘dollarization’ ? check out my interview with Jeffrey Fox on dollarization??or Jeffrey’s video about the same topic.
- How long has this problem been going on?
- What solutions have you already tried?
- Who else is affected by this problem?
- What does your ideal situation look like?
Wrapping Up
Always ask if your sales prospects have any questions for you as you’re winding down an appointment. If you’ve done your job correctly, your prospects will normally ask about how to work with you. Even if they don’t naturally look for a way to move forward with you, make sure you answer all of your prospects’ questions.
You can also ask follow up questions of your own to create a smoother transition to a conversion. You can ask something along the lines of…
… “How would you like to resolve your problem?” or
… “What are you going to do about your problem?”
Closing
If you’ve discovered that your prospect is a perfect fit for your product or service, close the deal. If a prospect isn’t a perfect fit, though, DON’T SELL! You don’t want to deal with customers or clients who are painful to work with.
I’ve recommended many other people to prospective clients and those prospects routinely come back and work with me later on, when they are a perfect fit for my services. People love anyone who genuinely help them out, rather than just trying to make a quick buck. That’s why people don’t like used car salesmen ? the people who try to sell you a car you don’t want, that’s not cool, that doesn’t fix your transportation problems, just to make a sale. But when you work with a salesperson who doesn’t put a lot of pressure on you and who will take the time to find you the perfect car, you love them.
Closing the sale doesn’t have to be stressful.
One line can make all of the difference:
“I think you would be a perfect fit for my program. Did you want to hear about it?”
Don?t go into a ton of detail about your program, or product, or service.
Prospects just need to know you have a solution for their problem.
I’ve also got a simple way to talk about price. I learned this approach from Sandler Sales Training ? my mentor trained me in this technique when I was 24 and it works amazingly well even today.”
Let’s go through the script:
?Do you know how much a coach costs??
(You need to check if they have expectations surrounding products like yours.)
?No.?
?Well, my full-time coaching program is $3,000 per month.?
(STOP TALKING! If they don?t say anything say, you can follow up.)
?Did that give you a heart attack??
The prospect will either say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
If you get a ‘no,’ –> keep going and tell the prospect more about that package.
If you get a ‘yes,’–> move to a less expensive package and start talking about it.
In my business, I offer both full-time and part-time packages, as well as Millionaire Hustlers for buyers who can’t afford a package yet.
With this approach, you aren’t trying to sell your prospects something way outside their comfort zones. They can feel really good about buying something that matches their needs. Personally, I don’t want anyone going into credit card debt to work with me. Yes, the point of my programs are to make MORE money, meaning that the purchase price is an investment, but I hate credit card debt and don’t want me clients to face it!
If your prospect says, ‘Yes, let’s do it!,’ tell them what to expect next.
?Great! I can?t wait to work with you. I?ll have my assistant send you an agreement with the payment link.?
Want to dig further into sales and objections?
This week’s interviewee, Claude Diamond, talks all about closing sales and responding to objections!
Convert Visitors to Your Sale Page
Have a product or service you sell online? Read this section!
Landing pages can get complicated. Every detail can change your conversion rates. Kissmetrics pulled together a bunch of different data about landing pages which illustrates what I’m talking about.
- You have 0-8 seconds to make a compelling headline and landing page. After 8 seconds, the majority of visitors leave.
- Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy.
- The more landing pages you have, the more leads you are likely to get.
- A 1 second delay in your site speed can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.
- A/B testing is becoming the preferred method that has brought a lot of the companies the most success.
You can see that there are a thousand different things that you can do to tweak your page. But since you need to focus on completing the challenge, let’s limit ourselves to just 3 actions for today:
- gathering data
- split-testing your headline
- and setting your call to action.
Gathering Data
One quotation always sticks in my mind when I think about writing sales pages:
“If you can describe the problem better than your prospect, they think you have the solution.”
You want any prospect visiting your sales page to read through it, nodding and saying, “That’s me!” all the way through. They’ll believe that you understand their problems so perfectly that you’re able to fix them. You need to find out exactly their problems and the words they use to describe those issues.
I can’t just give you my sales page and tell you to change the product name, unfortunately. To create a sales page that will convert your prospects into buyers, you need to directly address the people who are likely to buy from you. The conversion process for every product and service is different. Most importantly, different prospects face different pain points ? and to make a sale, you need to address your prospects and their pain points directly.
I strongly suggest talking to a few of your prospects and making a sale directly. You can use the techniques in the sales appointment section above to do so. Make a note of every pain point you hear so that you can respond to those problems in your sales page.
Depending on how far along your business is, you may have other sources of data as well:
- If you have a list, you can also send out a survey asking some or all of the pain point questions above.
- If you have a website and sales page receiving traffic, try out Optimizely‘s free starter package to collect more data and act on it.
Split-Testing Your Headline
This challenge only lasts for a week, so we have to focus on what we can accomplish in that time. That means just working on a few key parts of your sales page.
Your headline is the most important text in your sales page. ALL I want you to do right now is split-test your headline. To run a split test, you need to create a new version of your headline.
Prospects respond best to benefit-driven headlines that tell them exactly what they’re going to get.
Here’s a basic benefit-driven structure:
?How to do ___(benefit)____ in ___(timeframe)___ ?without __(objection)___?
When you fill in the blanks, you get a headline like ?How to make $1,000 in 7 days without spending any money!?
I’ve interviewed Neil Patel, the founder of Kissmetrics (as well as several other companies), and his interview is full of testing advice.?
On your webpage, though, you aren?t fighting for attention. You?ve already done something to funnel your visitors there. Now you just need to convince them to pull up their chairs and stay awhile.
People coming to your site are going to decide in a split second if they want to go back to their game of ?Words with Friends? or stay and see what you are all about. A key way to keep them is to tell them in plain language what your site is all about.
Selling a blanket with sleeves? ?Home of the Slanket, the famous blanket with sleeves.?
Selling a marketing consultancy? ?How to market better.?
Selling the latest location app? ?Find your friends instantly.?
Setting Your Call to Action
Your sales page should have one ? and only one ? call to action. What is the one thing that you want prospects to do after reading your sales page? Check over your sales page to make sure that’s the only step you’re asking prospects to take.
You also need your call to action to be compelling: it should be the logical next step after reading your sales page.
If you have extra time this week, spend it split-testing your call to action. Come up with different versions and see how they convert. But you should only tackle this extra credit if you’ve already set up a split-test for your headline.
Action Items:
Sales Appointment Actions:
- Figure out your current sales ratio. Write it down somewhere you will always have it!
- Practice the sales conversation with someone – whether it be a prospect or a friend. ?
- Keep track of the next 10 sales conversations and figure out your ratio using these techniques.
Sales Page Conversion Actions:
- Gather at least 5 new pieces of data from your audience that you can implement and use for the headline and call to action.
- Sign up for Optimizely.
- Split test your headline.
- (Optional) Split test your call to action.
Resources:?
24-point-conversion-checklist?From Millionaire Justin Christianson at Conversionfanatics.com
>> CHALLENGE CHECK-IN
Stay tuned tomorrow for Day 4 and be sure and catch up with us to share Big Money Wins in our Private 1K in 7 Days Facebook group!