Increase your lead to sale conversion rate
“I think that we have tightened up – I don’t just think I know”, says Paul Mills, Senior Design Manager Thames Valley Windows. “I was keeping my own stats before we got Business Pilot. Our lead to sale conversion rate was 2.3 for the year before we introduced Business Pilot. It went to 1.8 last year – that’s a 22% increase.
“Business Pilot has made us more efficient as a business – that’s not only how we run jobs but also how we sell.”
Thames Valley Windows switched to Business Pilot in 2019 having previously run on another CRM and accompanying management tools. As a cloud-based business and installation management tool, Business Pilot brought everything together into a single platform, supporting Thames Valley Windows in managing the lead to sale process, job scheduling installation and aftercare and finance.
Business Pilot also provides an overview of performance through its Sales Dashboard. This tracks leads, demos, daily, weekly and monthly sales, plus closing ratios.
There’s a lot that Business Pilot does to support operations, the drag and drop scheduling facility, so you can move jobs around without having to make multiple changes, but it’s also transformed our approach to sales and making us much more effective as a team”, Paul explains.
We can now track data much, much, better. Other than top level figures as to how we were performing at a business wide level, we weren’t really tracking data and performance.
Now we can go far deeper and be much more effective in our analysis. For example we used to hand out leads to the sales team based on a rough sense of how busy they were but without really understanding value.
“We now attribute an initial value and so I can see that if Rob has £700K of leads and Marcus has say only £250K, I maybe need to allocate more leads to Marcus.”
We can also see conversion rates and how people are progressing against each job.”
New capability introduced in February this year, according to Business Pilot makes the sales process flow even more fluidly.
The product of a year-long development programme, the new Business Pilot Status Progression tool is an easy-to-use, but massively powerful addition to the Business Pilot platform, which at its simplest, allows you to map your lead-to-contract or contract-to-delivery process – the things you do every day in your business – but digitally.
That simplifies things for team members; they’re prompted as they go to do each thing that they need to do to get the job done and because everyone is following the same process managers have full visibility of where a job is at any time. It allows you to automate certain processes, saving you and your team time.
You have much better visibility of the customer right through their journey”, says Paul. “That delivers a number of benefits”, he continues.
For example, as a sales team, we tend to remain the first point of contact for customers. Until we introduced Business Pilot, we’d end up taking calls about operational issues and say that we’d call them back, it might be something relatively straight forward, for example a follow up on an installation date, but we’d still need to speak to operations.
Now we just look. We see exactly where we are and explain that to the customer in minutes rather than having to go back a couple of hours later.
That reflects incredibly well on us because it reassures our customers that they’re dealing with a very professional company where everyone has visibility of what’s going on and they feel that they’re project is being managed in the best possible way.
If we’re going to call Mr Smith on Friday afternoon, we make sure that we do. It’s flagged for us so when we call Mr Smith as promised on Friday, he’s ‘oh, wow, this is an amazing company’.
We have other customers who need stuff to go through planning so frequently we’ve got cases to call back two-months three-months down the line.
Frankly, in the ‘bad old days’, with the best will in the world, they would have simply slipped through the cracks.
Now, I can say to a customer, ‘ok so you’re not ready now, so when will be a good time to call back?’ and I set myself a note to do so in a couple of months. We call back, they get a sense of how well we’re run – and it makes conversions far easier to achieve.
That’s genuinely the thing. The guy who ran sales here before was a force of nature, he was one of the former owners and he did an incredible job, but I knew that with the best will in the world, I wouldn’t be able to achieve what he did trying to do it the same way.
My success as a manger here is completely interconnected with the introduction of BP.
As we and our team use it over a longer period, we continue to extract more and more efficiencies from it, and it delivers more.
