When it comes to developing revenue for your service organization, there’s no such thing as too many qualified prospects. You might feel comfortable with your current level of business, but the fact is, with increased competition—and the threat of an oncoming recession—building new opportunities for your sales team should always be top of mind. We were lucky enough to connect with industry expert, Woody Woodall, and benefit from his 47 years of experience on what goes into creating revenue opportunities for your service organization.
Let’s start at the beginning. Before you even think about expanding your sales opportunities, you have to define clear markers for the success of your sales team. Some common KPIs include:
Focusing on these numbers will help the rest of your team see the importance of tracking data and making operational decisions based on a standard that exists across the entire rest of the organization.
These numbers, which are now being tracked across your sales team, can be further enforced by:
The bottom line? Your team will always work best when functioning as one cohesive unit. You need to find out which attributes bring your team together and identify which tools, physical or managerial, that they need for continued success.
The foundation for learning how to turn an opportunity into a win is understanding the basic lifecycle of what goes into creating a sale.
The secret is to avert your attention away from your expected number of sales, and refocus on the numbers outlined above that will lead to those eventual sales. These are the numbers that it takes to get a single win:
Once you understand traditional industry benchmarks, it’s time to create your own. By applying your own average numbers to these benchmarks and using them to measure improvement over time, you can identify where your team needs to focus their efforts in order to improve performance. This can help you identify pain points in the sales process and make adjustments to improve success.
Some of the conversion rates you can use to define these benchmarks include:
When selling to a prospect, it is important to identify their pain points and propose a solution for that pain. Selling on value, rather than price, can help create a more meaningful connection between the customer and your product or service. Providing a resolution for the customer’s pain point is the key to successful sales, and can help build long-term trust and loyalty.
Your historical performance is a goldmine when it comes to targeting potential prospects. Pulling reports on the most profitable industries, job types, and customers will help your sales team narrow down the field of potential prospects and equip them with the ammunition they need to target businesses with the highest likelihood of success. Using data you’ve already collected is a great way to improve your sales team’s efficiency and success rate when targeting new business opportunities.
The right field service management platform can provide you with the data analysis necessary to identify:
With these key pieces of information in mind, you can work to narrow your sales pipeline and go after the most profitable new leads.
When looking to maximize your profit margins, you can think about it in one of two ways, generating new income, or optimizing your operation to encourage recurring business. Personally? We believe you should be concentrating on both.
Remember, it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one. Focusing on your sales pipeline is good for both injecting quick cash flow into your business and expanding your client portfolio. At the same time, optimizing operations such as maximizing profit margins, insulating the business from labor gaps, and protecting against recession, directly impacts customer retention.
Now that you have a better understanding of your target market, there are several other key performance indicators that you can focus on to improve your business. These include:
Remember, improving customer service and streamlining your company processes are just as important for keeping existing business as it is for going after new leads. If you’re looking for more info on how to bolster sales at your service business, check out the full webinar here, or visit the BuildOps product page and find out how our platform can help position your service organization for future success.
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