62 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
The 10 commandments of converting leads
and enquiries
The 10 commandments
1 Understand that everyone who talks to prospects is in ‘sales’.
2 Challenge and question current methods and results.
3 Quantify the potential revenue from leads and enquiries.
4 Track and monitor the right information.
5 Get the batting order right.
6 Differentiate – understand the test drive concept and that ‘feelings’ are
everything.
7 Don’t fall into the price trap.
8 Get the basics of telephone rst response and meet and greet right.
9 Get outside help – ACT.
10 Understand and master the ve-step conversion process.
1. Understand that everyone who talks to prospects is
in ‘sales’
When it comes to dealing with leads and enquiries it is vital for you, your
call handlers or whoever physically meets customer prospects to under-
stand that they have a ‘sales’ role. This might seem like a statement of
the obvious, but all too often, callers and visitors are simply ‘processed’
as a matter of administration and in many cases the prospective customer
or client is almost made to feel like a nuisance. Thus I want you to start
thinking of your customer service team, receptionists, assistants, support
staff, administrators, switchboard people, in fact anyone who might have
contact with a prospect, as in ‘sales’. Yes, I know many ‘job descriptions’
might not mention this, but let me explain why all these people do have
a ‘sales’ role.
The fact is that anyone who contacts your company with an enquiry is in
a buying position. Whether they have telephoned with a question about
price, or walked into your shop or premises to ask about a product or just to
get a brochure, they have the power and choice to buy from you, someone
else, or not at all.
Therefore, if they are a potential buyer and someone from your company
is dealing with their enquiry, then as a matter of logic, your colleague,
whoever they are, is occupying a sales role, whether they like it or not.
5
Priority 1 – Convert leads, opportunities and enquiries into profitable business 63
This being the case, they need to know it, be comfortable with that fact
and become good at inuencing prospects to actively want to do business
with your organisation.
2. Challenge and question current methods and results
One of the most common problems I nd in businesses of all sizes is that
they rarely just take time out to stop, look at existing methods of dealing
with leads and enquiries, challenge what they are doing and look at conver-
sion results strategically. In fact, many fail to have any proper conversion
tracking information at all to work from.
In many businesses, methods for dealing with the leads and enquiries
have simply evolved organically. I often nd that team members ‘do their
own thing’ with little effective training or analysis. Many dealing with
telephone leads are on mental auto-pilot, so that every caller or visitor is
dealt with in virtually the same way. So, for example, the telephone goes
and the call handler’s brain automatically ips into ‘call handling mode’
and out come the same questions, same information and all delivered in
the same tone of voice. Now this would be ne if it got great results at the
most protable rates on a sustained basis. The problem, however, is that
this is not always the case.
Thus, the second commandment is to accept as a matter of business philo-
sophy the need to stand back and strategically analyse the current picture.
3. Quantify the potential revenue from leads and enquiries
Understanding just how much is at stake creates leverage for change. Once
you know just how much even a small increase in conversion rates is worth
to your business it adds power and inuence to your efforts and justies
the time, resources and often mental shift required by personnel to adapt
to new methods.
So one of the rst things you need to do, to demonstrate to yourself or
colleagues just how phenomenally important this area is, is to actually sit
down with a calculator, spreadsheet or pen and paper and quantify with a
reasonably acceptable degree of accuracy the potential revenue from your
existing enquiries and leads.
Let’s suppose then that an average customer spend is £1,000 and you
average four enquiries a day in each ve-day week. This means you’re gen-
erating at the moment 20 enquiries a week. To keep the maths simple, let’s
64 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
assume 50 working weeks in the year. This means then that you are dealing
with 1,000 leads in the year, at an average revenue of £1,000 per enquiry.
This represents £1 million a year.
Without any external spend on business development activities, promotion
or marketing, if you are able to increase your conversion rate of purchases
off these leads by 20 per cent this is worth an extra £200,000 to you. That
of course doesn’t factor in the number of extra customers and clients who
will buy other goods and services from you again in the future.
Obviously you will need to do your own calculations based on the number
of leads you generate and of course the nancial value of your various prod-
ucts and services. However, the simple formula always remains the same:
Number of leads/enquiries for specic goods or services 3 the average customer or
client spend on them 5 potential revenue.
Have you ever worked this out?
4. Track and monitor the right information
Given the above commandments about quantifying the potential and
questioning your current methods, it should be obvious to you now that
it is vital for you to have reasonably precise statistical tracking informa-
tion on the enquiries and leads that are being generated and your current
conversion rates.
Here are the basic items of information that you should have in order to be
able to track and monitor this area effectively. If you don’t have this infor-
mation then you are trading and operating at a business disadvantage and
if you really want to improve your business development results then you
need to take steps to ll this gap in your strategic knowledge.
How many new enquiries do you get per day/week? (If you can do this
exercise for different products or services and locations, so much the better.)
What are your leads and enquiries worth in average revenue terms?
Who actually handles the enquiries and has ‘conversion responsibility’?
What are their personal conversion rates?
Once you have this information, you will be in a much stronger position
to make decisions about new strategies, structures and techniques and of
course to measure future improvements.
5
Priority 1 – Convert leads, opportunities and enquiries into profitable business 65
How you record and track this information will vary of course from busi-
ness to business according to its size, sector and scale of operation. Small
businesses may be able to do it manually, while bigger enterprises may
devise and create their own software applications to perform this task.
However you do it, one very practical tip: keep it as simple as possible. Go
for the minimum of information as mentioned above that will be helpful
and track it well, rather than trying to gather too much information and
ending up doing it badly.
5. Get the batting order right
Understand this concept and implement the suggestions and I absolutely
guarantee an increase in your conversion rates, even if you do nothing else
at all.
Let me explain: just as in a game of cricket where it is generally accepted
that the best batsmen go in to bat rst, you need to make sure that those
enquiry handlers in your organisation who currently get the best conver-
sion rates handle the most prospects.
So for example, with telephone enquiries, the reality for many small and
medium-sized organisations is that it is almost random who handles
incoming telephone enquiries from prospects. One of the rst questions I
ask business development people is: what determines who actually handles
incoming new business calls? Here is a sample of the most common
responses I get:
‘We have a rota so that no one person gets too burdened down with
dealing with telephone enquiries and leads.’
‘Bob deals with enquiries on Monday, Wednesday and Friday
afternoons and Sally deals with them on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday
morning.’
‘We pass all enquiries through to whoever is least busy.’
‘If it’s just the price someone wants, switchboard have the gures . . .
they can give them out.’
‘We don’t want the senior staff wasting their time talking to callers, so
we have their secretaries deal with them.’
With the Bob and Sally example, this sort of administrative-led process is
ne assuming that both Bob and Sally get broadly similar results in terms of
the conversion rates. However, what if Bob gets three times better results?
66 The Financial Times Guide to Business Development
Surely as a matter of commercial commonsense it is ludicrous for Sally to
handle as many of the leads as Bob. At the very least get Sally some training
to help her improve how she handles leads.
My recommendation and strategy are incredibly simple and dramatically
effective. Monitor, track and nd out who gets the best conversion rates
and then do whatever you have to do to make sure that that person handles
the majority of enquiries.
Provided you have managed this process sensitively within your organisa-
tion, it is inevitable that your overall average conversion rate goes up and
thus your revenue and prots are increased.
6. Differentiate – understand the test drive concept and
that ‘feelings’ are everything
Have you asked yourself this very blunt question? Why should a potential
customer or client choose my product or service as opposed to a com-
petitor’s? Ultimately what is it that is going to differentiate you and your
business from the competition?
I’ll tell you what the most common answers are when I ask businesses this
question:
‘We are friendly and approachable.’
‘Because we give a quality personal service.’
‘We sell reliable quality products.’
‘We are efcient.’
‘We are a specialist business.’
‘We like to take an interest in our customers and clients.’
I have been given these sorts of responses thousands of times. The list of
meaningless platitudes is almost endless. Yes, I did say meaningless and I’ll
tell you why. In most cases these are not points that distinguish you from
your competition, they are simply implied attributes of all people in busi-
ness who have goods or services to sell. Virtually everyone says the same
few things.
By the way, if you are nding it hard to come up with something that abso-
lutely differentiates you from your competitors, think how much harder it
is for a prospective client or customer, who doesn’t know your business at
all, to appreciate why they should go with you.
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