By Jeff Prager Backroom Management

The next in a series on seven keys to managing your business and building profits.

Just because you’ve generated solid leads does not mean your prospects are ready to sign contracts.

They’ve got questions, concerns, objections and barriers to buying, and you need a system to overcome their hurdles if you are to sell them a new home — a system to improve your sales conversion rate, key #2 in this series to managing your business and building greater profits.

I will not discuss sales techniques. Plenty of sales trainers can teach you techniques better than I can. But before you begin using new sales techniques, you need to create a system or foundation that will help you to determine their effectiveness and modify them accordingly.

This is the same system I discussed in the first article of the series about generating new leads — the GSAE: Goals, Strategies, Action Plans and Evaluation system.

With it, you don’t just try new sales techniques and hope they work. Rather, you approach sales and selling systematically, evaluating what you try and adjusting or discarding the technique as necessary.

To do this, you first establish your sales conversion goal. Then, you identify three test strategies to reach it, implement them through detailed action plans and then compare the time, energy and money you spent on each plan against the benchmark you hoped to achieve.

By comparing the results, you can decide whether you should repeat, modify or discard a particular strategy, or all three.

So, how do you determine which strategies to try? First, you need to know what’s working and what isn’t.

The "Sales Mountain," by trainer Eric Lofholm, can help sales treams determine what sales strategies work and don't work.

To do this, I always tell my clients to chart their “Sales Mountain” — a sales approach created by trainer Eric Lofholm, of SalesChampion.com, that segments the daunting sales process into a series of manageable steps.

If you were climbing one of Colorado’s 14,000-foot mountains, reaching the peak should not be your initial goal. No, you would first strive to reach the waterfall a mile or so up the hill. Once you achieved that, your next goal would be the mountain lake, then the abandoned mine, the tree line, the false peak and so on until, finally, you reached the peak.

This milestone-by-milestone approach turns what can an overwhelming sales process into a series of easy-to-accomplish tasks.

With sales, for instance, when the phone rings, your initial goal is not to make the sale, it’s to set an appointment. Your next goal is to build trust and rapport with your prospects, and then once that’s accomplished, your goal is to identify your customer’s needs.

As you can see in the accompanying illustration, the “Sales Mountain” depicts eight milestones that must be achieved in order to make the sale. The most effective way to do this is to approach each stage with the goal of simply accomplishing it before tackling the next one.

The GSAE system enables you to evaluate the steps you use to climb your “Sales Mountain.”

With it, every strategy becomes measurable. You determine what works, what doesn’t and why. And after thoroughly evaluating them, you will know what techniques and processes to keep, what to fix and what to change.

The GSAE system enables you to maximize your sale conversion rate by systematically ensuring that the sound, solid leads that you generate result in many more trips to the bank.

Next: Key #3 —Your rate of customer retention.

To read the first article in the series about increasing your number of leads, click here.

Jeff Prager is the CEO of Backroom Management, based in Centennial, Colo., which provides the proprietary tools, systems and expertise that builders need to increase their profits. His “7 Key Numbers” system helps business owners determine their own seven key goals — and the paths to reach them — to make managing their business toward greater profits far simpler. For more information, visit Backroom Management at www.backroommanagement.com; or e-mail Prager, or call him at 303-221-0823.

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