Selling as a Service-based Business Owner | My Secret to an 80% Conversion Rate
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My Best Sales Secrets for Service Based Business Owners
A lot of entrepreneurs struggle with sales. We’re the creatives, right? The dreamers, the visionaries, and we hope and pray that if we build it, they will come.
Which, if you listened to this podcast episode, I’m guessing you’ve already found out for yourself that that is not usually the case.
In the early stages of starting a business, it’s easy to think that if we build something incredible, or we take the most beautiful photos, or we design the most captivating websites… people will want what we have. Won't they?
For a while, that works. We ride the wave of being new to the market and enjoying our family and friends telling others about us.
But eventually, it’s like someone flips a switch, and all of a sudden, those automatic leads are slowly but surely drying up and we have to face the S-word. SALES.
I don’t consider myself a sales expert by any means. I never had an interest in sales, I’ve never had any experience working in sales professionally. but I’ll tell you this- year to date, I’ve closed 80% of the sales calls I made for BrandWell.
Let me say that again…80% you guys! How do I know this? I use a customer management software, Honeybook, that actually tracks every inquiry, every call, and every sale that I make in my business.
If you're familiar with sales, a CR of 80% is unheard of these days. To give an industry average for a good sales conversion rate, anything over 10% would be excellent. Meaning 90% of the people you get on a sales call with don’t convert and 10% do but my numbers are almost reversed.
I saw this statistic through my CRM a couple of months ago and I was floored. I don’t follow any formula on my calls. As I said, I was never formally trained but I am going to share two factors that I believe contribute to an incredibly high conversion rate that you can steal from me and use for your own business
Building Social Proof
Before I share anything about the actual sales call I make or what my “secret sauce” is… I have to tell you what I really think is the driving factor for my high conversion rate. We have spent the last 3 years building a TON of social proof that we deliver on our promises. We do this in 3 ways.
Social media. We share our brand designs, website designs, and any tips we can regularly on social media. When I get on a call with someone, it’s pretty likely that they’ve followed my brand on social media for a while and have already seen the proof that we do what I say we do.
2. A good brand reputation. Not only do I have reviews from happy customers sprinkled all over my website, but I also have made a conscious effort to start getting Google reviews. If you were to hit pause on this episode, go to Google, and punch in BrandWell, the first thing you’ll see is our Google My Business profile with 24 5-star reviews. Now that number is nowhere near where I want it to be but considering we just started using GMB over the last 6 months or so, I’m pretty happy with it.
3. A credible website. My website has pages upon pages of what our work looks like, what our clients are saying, and another thing that it has that may be a bit controversial is my pricing.
When I worked in Corporate America, I was always taught not to put your pricing on your website if you had an expensive product. Branding and website design usually run in the thousands of dollars range so I’d consider that expensive. The reason I decided to put my pricing on my website is because I consider my target audience to be a lot like me. They are serious about growing their business. They’re willing to make investments where they need to, and they don’t want their time to be wasted.
To be quite honest, I don’t want my time to be wasted either. If I’m not even in the ballpark of the budget of someone I’m about to hop on the phone with, I’d rather save both their time and mine by making that clear upfront.
A powerful social media strategy, a good brand reputation with lots of reviews, and giving people the info they need to make an informed decision through my website, are what I believe the things that get people “primed to buy” before they even get on the phone with me.
My Sales Call Secret Sauce
So now let’s talk about the phone call itself. This is a smaller piece of the puzzle in my mind because like I said, most of the time people get on the phone with me, they’ve been on my website, they’ve stalked our social media, maybe they’ve Googled my brand… but now we're talking. While I don’t follow a specific formula on my calls, here are 3 things I do with each and every person I speak to.
Let the potential customer do the talking while you do the listening. As much as I love to hear about other people’s businesses and how they started them, people love to talk about themselves. As you know, we work with female entrepreneurs at BrandWell so just about everyone I get on the phone with has a unique start-up story or side-hustle story and we spend the bulk of our time talking about just that- their story.
2. Share how your offer can play a role in getting them closer to their goals. The next thing I do is share how we at Brandwell can play a role in the story that they’re already writing. I talk about how my team can come and take what they’ve worked so hard to build and help to amplify their message through killer branding or through a website. I’m not talking about how many pages our package includes or how our payment plan is structured - that can certainly come in at the end if they have questions about it- but while I have their attention, I want them to understand the bigger picture of what investing in brand or web design can do for their business.
3. Answer their objections. The last thing that I do for each client is give them a chance to share their objections. If you are not doing this, you’re not only missing out on sales but you’re also missing out on critical data about your target audience. Truly, friends, all of the messaging you see on our website or in our social media captions comes from conversations I had with customers and prospects. I hear their struggles, I hear what their buying objections are and because I listen to that, I can then figure out solutions to those problems.
Branding your business is all about creating a visually aesthetic, memorable identity that is accompanied by a powerful message of how you’re solving a problem for the person on the other end of the screen (or on the other side of the door if you have a brick-and-mortar business).
Now let’s go close some sales!
KEEP BRANDING WELL,
Victoria
