Sales Velocity: Moving Leads Through the Sales Pipeline

When the economy starts to shift, so do customers. Every purchasing decision can suddenly carry more weight, which affects how people think of buying services. How can businesses in the home service industry prepare for shifting economies and buying behaviors? While there are many strategies for reacting to nation-wide economic issues, it really comes down to our front-line sales teams to continue to close jobs and provide certainty to customers. That’s where an understanding of sales velocity becomes important.

Sales velocity is the speed at which customers move through the sales pipeline, from first call to closed deal. The more efficient this process is, the more likely the customer will buy your product or service. 

Here are some ways to empower your sales team to move customers through the pipeline and increase closing ratios. 

Compete with expectations - not competitors

It’s easy to get caught up in competition with shops that offer similar services to yours. While it’s a really good idea to know what your competitors are up to, and wise to have competitor analyses done, we have to be ready to compete with our customers' expectations - not competitors. At the end of the day, it’s your customer that matters, not your competition. Learn what it is that customers expect from you, and if you can deliver, you will gain trust, and in turn close more jobs. 

Here are a few things customers want: 

Provide information quickly

Customers are demanding more information faster. No longer can we say “I’ll get back to you.” Customers have instant access online to multiple services in their area, so we need to be ready with answers, information, and availability to meet their needs as soon as they contact us. 

Be available by phone and online

In today’s world, it’s important to be present wherever your customer is looking for services; which means having a website and easy ways posted for customers to contact you. Posting a phone number is important, along with relevant email addresses, social media accounts, and easy-to-use chat features. More importantly though, is simply being available when a customer contacts you. Letting calls go to voicemail, or allowing an email to remain unopened for days, is a sure way to lose potential jobs to your competitors. When customers call, they need someone to answer them.

What to do with Sales Velocity?

So now that we know some of the things customers want from a business, how do we translate that to sales velocity? Starting with an understanding of your customer’s wants and needs leads to more efficiency in planning strategies to get them from the first point of contact to a closed job. One of the best places to start is with Sales Enablement Tools.

Sales enablement tools; how they can help

We’ve covered what sales velocity is, and what customers want from businesses while they are in the sales pipeline. Now let’s take a look at Sales Enablement Tools, and see how they can help move customers through the pipeline to increase velocity, and in turn, increase sales. 

There is a lot to keep track of when determining how long it takes to close a job; like how many phone calls, messages, pictures, and videos go back and forth in between initial contact and the sale. Sales enablement tools can put all of that information in one place, and make it readily available to sales teams so they can see what works and what doesn’t. Tools like BidClips make it easy to cut out all the back and forth that often leads to a lost customer. 

What’s your closing ratio?

When you take an honest look at your business’s closing ratios, what do you see? We’ve found that most companies find themselves somewhere between 35-40%, which leaves a lot of room for improvement. With good sales enablement tools, businesses can remove a lot of the friction and barriers between themselves and customers and increase that ratio significantly. We find that the faster and better a company’s estimate presentation is to the customer, the faster and more likely it is that they'll close the right clients.

75,000 calls, 75% closing ratios

We’ve done a lot of work at BidClips to identify ways to move customers through the sales pipeline. Our platform enables customers to upload photos, videos, details, and measurements of their project from the start, cutting out a large portion of back-and-forth from the very beginning. We also provide messaging tools to simplify communication, online payment options to make paying easy, automated follow-up software to encourage customers to convert, and so much more. 

One of our most recent developments comes in tandem with a project done by our friends at Pest Daily. They studied over 15,000 calls, and tracked leads from first contact to closed deals. Then they took the data they learned to create a script that closes jobs at a ratio of 75.6%! Teaming up with Pest Daily, we’ve been able to incorporate that script into the BidClips platform, giving our users even more of an edge when it comes to increasing their sales. We’ve even introduced this script into our BidClips Starter plan, meaning that for less than a tank of gas per month, you can see a drastic increase in sales when you sign up. 

Get with the modern customer

What are you doing with the calls and leads that come into your business? Are you turning them into jobs, or letting them slip away? Learning to understand sales velocity and implementing sales enablement tools is the best way for businesses to keep up with the modern customer’s expectations. Get a free BidClips demo to learn more!

Listen to the Podcast from Today In Trades about this topic on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!