The sales team is a source of revenue — however, oftentimes superficially measured sales activities are a source of unnecessary costs. While working with our clients it has frequently turned out that some efforts put into acquiring customers required a significant commitment of highly paid specialists, although the potential for possible cooperation didn’t justify it. This article describes situations in your company, that (if not measured) may generate unnecessary costs.
It’s not necessarily profitable to create dedicated pricing for every company
During consultations with one of our clients, it turned out that he often struggles with a situation where a potential client declares a low budget. With the X amount indicated, the cooperation could be profitable, but in practice for each of the leads with a small budget, it was necessary to create a dedicated sales quote (which took several hours of work for busy and highly paid specialists). Only a small portion of these clients eventually decided to enter into a cooperation. As a result, working with a single small budget client paid off, but the total time needed to create the quote for smaller customers generated costs that were too high in relation to profits.
The solution in this situation was to prepare an offer containing a range of activities that could be done within the indicated amount for companies with a budget of „no more than X”. Since then, when a potential client declares a low budget, he receives this prepared quote, which has in practice freed up a lot of time for specialists who were involved in creating the offer less frequently.
Service productisation
One of our clients used to devote a lot of time to preparing the sales quotes of the workshops, during which he helped his customers refine the vision of the product that his company were to create next. Each of these workshops was priced individually, which involved a lot of time of the person looking after clients and extended the sales cycle.
In practice, it turned out that the dedicated valuations can be replaced by 3 packages: small, large and medium, which were priced only once, and during the presentation of the offer it was indicated which of them best suited the client’s problem.
Face-to-face meetings are more expensive than you think
In another company of several dozen people, the CEO was the only person who was acquiring clients. During the analysis of the sales process, it turned out that if the potential customer was based in the same city, then the sales talks took place in his office. As a result, the meeting, which is usually a teleconference that lasts 30 minutes, took 2-3 hours including the commute (and sometimes even the whole day). When it was decided that outside meetings would take place only when larger budgets are at stake, the CEO could spend less time than before acquiring clients. He would only go to meetings when it was justified by a significant potential for cooperation.
Excessive involvement in acquiring low-quality leads and ineffective project price evaluation processes make the costs of acquiring customers skyrocket. That’s why it makes sense to analyse sales in your company in terms of whether any of its stages generate unnecessary costs, which could be reduced by (a more thoughtful and supported by CRM data) involvement of selected specialists.
This is one of the few places where you can earn more by actually doing much less.
