What’s Considered a Reasonable Close Rate?
It’s reasonable to assume you can move your closing ratios up to 45%, 48%, 50%, or 55% before you start to question the system and its legal and ethical implications. However, we do want to move our closing ratios up there. I can’t provide that number specifically because every market, product, or service is different across the world when it comes to sales.
How to Improve Our Closing Ratios
The biggest way to increase your closing ratios is to monetize the value—tangible and intangible—that the customer is going to get from your product. If you are able to tell a customer that they can receive a return on investment that is measured in either a savings of time, money, parts, or service that they get from buying your product, or a return on investment measured in terms of a gain—something that will produce more sales, increase their profits, or accelerate their revenue—then you can improve your closing ratio.
If you are able to save the customer by having them invest x in your product, you’ll save y which gives you a return on investment of z. Thus, you are more likely to close that business. Indeed, in order to accomplish that, you have to focus on the monetization of your value in the qualifications or needs and solutions portion of your sales cycle.
This monetization of your value means that you have to ask a number of questions: where are their costs coming from now, how much is that costing them, how much do they think they can save, what’s a reasonable amount you can bring that down to, how much are they looking to gain, what would they do with that gain in their business, or what value do they think they can get from this project being a success? When you are comfortable asking those questions and monetizing them, you’ll get comfortable showing a return on investment and your sales velocity will dramatically increase.
[…] other priorities, and does not have a sense of urgency. As a result, indeed, we see an elongated sales […]
The idea of monetizing the difference between you and your competition can show your prospect the difference between your product and the competitor’s.
[…] of companies who have all formalized and institutionalized this process of demonstrating tangible return on investment with their sales teams by building return on investment […]