December 21st educational moment at Winchester Friday BNI

If you have to choose between a product that is recommended by a friend that you have known for years, and a product that is recommended in an ad on TV, which one do you trust more?

That should be an easy answer, the recommendation by your friend of coarse. How about this one: you visit a restaurant and one waiter says: “everything on the menu is great” or the waiter that says: “I would not take the fish”.  You all seem to prefer the waiter that was actually a bit more negative about the fish. Why would that be?

It is all because of trust. We trust people when we perceive that they are looking out for our best interests.

This begs the question: “What are you doing to show to your clients that you are looking out for their best interests?” Assuming you are of coarse. For example, do you really think that not staying in contact with them for longer than a year is a sign of you really looking out for their best interests?

<transcript from Rene’s educational moment at November 23 2012>

Let me share my conversion rates with you:

18 – 9 – 4 – 3

18 cold leads, or BNI ‘referrals’ of the kind ‘such and so would like to meet you’ will lead to 9 people that actually say that they want me to take an in depth look at their business to see what their business could actually do better. So that is about halve. I call those ‘warm’ or ‘serious leads’. As you can imagine, this is the phase where I deselect some as well, a they are clearly not ready for coaching, or I doubt that they ever really agreed to meeting me but just said yes to you to get you off their back.

Of those 9 that say ‘yes’ to taking an in depth look at their business, only 4 will actually have that session with me. Why I loose more than halve in this stage is still not clear to me. I suspect that the southern politeness plays a role, where you don’t say ‘no’ in somebodies face. Most of them set appointments, and then mention to me that they need to postpone it, and we keep postponing it until it never happens. Or I show up at the confirmed appointment and there is nobody there…

Of the 4 that actually will have a session with me, 3 will actually sign up to become a client because they have that potential that I am looking for, and they appear ‘coachable’.

so basically 6 cold leads, to 3 warm leads, to 1 client.

Why do you think that I measure these conversions from phase to phase?

The answer is of coarse: “What you do not measure, you do not improve”. When I started I closed less than 1 out of 5 in that last meeting versus the 3 out of 4 now.

I measured, and tweaked the process, and measured again.

Do you know your sales conversion numbers from phase to phase?