There are some things in life that are supposed to be really complicated; being a parent, learning how to invest and running your own business. When you look at all of these things nothing could be further from the truth.

Parents are taught by their children, investors are taught by their experiences and business owners should be taught by a mentor.

Often when I look at businesses it is clear that the owners have given up trying to improve their lot in life because they think that it is too complicated an issue to generate more activity. They think they need to be Einstein to invent some radical new way of doing business.

When I speak to most business owners for the first time and ask them what they think their sales conversion rate is, they almost always say 60-70%. Sometimes this is true, though most times it is not and with our testing and measuring system, we help business owners to find out what it really is. And surprisingly enough the true answer on average is around 30%.

So what that means is that only 3 out of 10 new leads will purchase from you on average. Now when you consider the cost to buy a new lead, that is the cost of the marketing you need to do to get the phone to ring, people to come in, or to get hits on your website, 3 out of 10 is too low.

There is some good news though … at Action we have 83 strategies to help you improve your conversion rate. And let’s face it, you can’t double 60%, but you can certainly double or even triple 30%. Now I’m not about to tell you all 83 ways to increase your conversion rate right now, but here’s 2 that you can certainly start with …

The first step is to flow chart your sales process … now you may be thinking “what sales process?” Whether you realise it or not, you do have a sales process! For some of you it may be woeful, and for others it may be acceptable, though for most of you it probably is not consistent every time.

You see by flow charting your sales process, you will be able to clearly see what each step in the process is and where it may need to be improved. Having a step by step process, right from the sending out of the marketing piece, to the after sales services, will help bring about a critical aspect of selling … consistency.

The second part to the equation is the sales scripts that need to support each step of the sales process. It’s one thing to have a step by step sales process; it’s another thing to know what to say at each step every time an enquiry is made.

The simplest way to do this is to write down what you say when you have a good sales experience and then work on improving this over time. Or if you have several sales people on your team, work out what your best sales person does and says and document that. This includes the initial phone call, the face to face enquiry and any other contact you may have in the sales process. And even the thankyou letter or card after the sale is made.

By flow charting your sales process and writing sales scripts for every step of the process you will certainly bring about consistency, which will help develop confidence and ultimately help you increase you sales conversion rate … remember to keep it simple.