By Carlee Driscoll

All businesses need new work coming through the door to run a sustainable business. All businesses have some form of natural attrition and need to ensure they can get fresh business from existing clients and/or new clients. The business owners who set goals and work hard to get new clients are typically the type of business owners we sit around the table with every day discussing marketing. Once in a while we get a client across the table from us that makes an interesting case study.

They usually come to us looking for more marketing wanting more enquiries and more people through the door. With a little further digging we can find that they don’t necessarily have a marketing problem, they have a conversion problem. What do we mean by a conversion problem? In simple terms it means they are not able to convert enquiries into sales. 

Think about say a builder specialising in renovations. Let’s call him Bob. Bob comes to us and says he wants to grow his business. Sure we will partner with Bob to work through what his best options are to grow his business but importantly we need to understand his conversion rates. Let’s imagine that currently Bob gets the opportunity to quote on five new jobs a week. That is five new clients to meet, five new houses to go to and measure up, five new quotes to pull together and five follow ups to make. Some more marketing effort could easily increase this opportunity to quote. But there is little point doing this if Bob isn’t effectively converting those quotes into sales that will actually create revenue.

Instead of helping Bob with his website and his advertising we may need to help Bob with his quotes and his follow up processes. Is he demonstrating value in his quotes? Is he addressing all his customer’s needs and worries? Is he managing their expectations? Is he following up when he said he would? There are lots of aspects that affect Bob’s ability to close a sale.

Of course, quoting is natural and expected part of his industry but it is important to look at sales and conversion in conjunction with marketing to really drive a business forward. Otherwise Bob could end up busily quoting day after day in response to marketing efforts without getting a cent coming in to pay for it.

Carlee is the Strategic Marketing Planner for Chilli. If you’d like to see how Carlee and the Chilli team can help you grow your business call 5437 7788