Your performance doesn’t just impact your reputation, it also affects your revenue. Even the best brokers often make simple mistakes that can result in lost revenue and long-term damage to your image.
The irony is these mistakes are driven from the best intentions. Brokers are often uber-focused on larger and later stage deals—as they should be—but this unfortunately often leads to neglect either at the early stages of the sales cycle or on deals that are in mid-stream, impeding your long term pipeline and hurting your reputation.
While larger strategic deals and meeting quota should continue to be a top priority, awareness of the common leaks at the top of the funnel can be a good initial step to a healthier long-term pipeline.
Here are three common mistakes to avoid:
The irony is these mistakes are driven from the best intentions. Brokers are often uber-focused on larger and later stage deals—as they should be—but this unfortunately often leads to neglect either at the early stages of the sales cycle or on deals that are in mid-stream, impeding your long term pipeline and hurting your reputation.
While larger strategic deals and meeting quota should continue to be a top priority, awareness of the common leaks at the top of the funnel can be a good initial step to a healthier long-term pipeline.
Here are three common mistakes to avoid:
1. Failing to follow up with leads
Research shows an alarming number of brokers fail to respond to qualified leads at all. Before you discredit this stat and say, “This doesn’t apply to me!” a study conducted in August 2014 found that 13% of inquiring buyers never received a response from a sales rep, and 29% never received a call.
To put this statistic in perspective, let’s say you generate 10,000 leads per year on average. If 13% of your leads go unanswered, that would mean 1,300 leads are wasted annually. If you are converting at a 7% lead-to-close rate, that translates into 91 additional deals that could have been had, but weren’t. Multiply this by your average deal size and you’ll quickly see how much this problem (or opportunity, depending how you look at it) is worth.
2. Responding too late
All too often, ready buyers enter information on your website eager for a call back, only to be left waiting hours, or days, for a response. Research shows this scenario is not uncommon, with the average prospect waiting just over two days to hear from a sales rep. This statistic represents another tremendous opportunity for sales teams. In fact, industry research shows lead response time is the number one driver of lead conversion. Even just following up within 30 minutes of receiving a lead can increase the likelihood of converting that lead into a customer by more than 60 percent.
3. Giving up too soon
While some brokers worry that repeated follow-up attempts will put off a customer, studies show that sales reps, on average, give up way too soon, making just one or two contact attempts. Evidence shows that prospects respond positively to persistence. In fact, most research shows that conversion rates continue to rise, with good return, up to the sixth call or so.
Words of caution—persisting well beyond the sixth call can have a negative impact on your reputation and could also waste valuable resources as diminishing returns set in. Also, you’ll want to be mindful to strategically space the contact attempts. You wouldn’t want to make all six contact attempts in the first couple of days; rather, space them out over a few weeks.
You hold your reputation and potential revenue in your hands. Each interaction (or lack of interaction) with the customer matters and has an impact on your top line performance.
Consider ways you can avoid these common mistakes, such as
- build out your team to include a virtual or actual assistant focused on responding to and qualifying leads
- put a process in place to ensure proper and systematic follow up on all leads
- leverage automation and technology to help prioritize daily activities and stay on top of leads.
If you can put more focus on leads at all stages, you’ll be able to generate more revenue, more predictably, and improve the buyers’ impression of you while you’re at it.