To catch up on part 3 click here now…
How Hundreds Of Thousands In Sales And Profits Leak Out Of Your MSP On A Daily Basis
I don’t think there is anything more frustrating and disheartening than working your tail off to do lead generation and marketing to get an appointment with a lead, only to have that opportunity forgotten, ignored, or neglected (whether it’s by you or your salesperson) post-appointment.
It’s like doing all of the hard work for a big, important game — you train hard every day, practice for hours and hours with the team, buy all the right gear, meticulously study game reels, get your head mentally ready and visualize your win — only to quit in the second half. All that hard work for nothing but embarrassment, wasted time, wasted money, and resentful teammates.
The same is true for neglected opportunities from appointments. You’ve done all the hard work and wooing to get that appointment, but it’s like you’re scared to continue the pursuit to finish the close after. You say and hear, “I sent the proposal. Now the ball is in their court.” Heck no, it’s not! You should still be the one dribbling the ball and calling the plays!
If you don’t have a tool to carefully babysit, oversee, and manage your opportunities, then you are wasting time, money, and energy. Additionally, by not keeping opportunities engaged, this could make you look incompetent to your lead if you’re neglecting them and frustrating your team by not pursuing as you should for the close.
Whatever you’re using to manage your opportunities (an automated service, a spreadsheet, or Infusionsoft’s Opportunities Module, which is what we recommend), you must be sure that it has the following features and capabilities:
1. Easy To Use And Manage: If it’s cumbersome, clunky, slow, or user-unfriendly, you and your team just won’t use it. Period. Choose one that makes it easy to create and manage opportunities!
2. Gives Visibility To The Whole Sales Team: If your salesperson is “managing” their opportunities in a spreadsheet, on Post-it Notes, or even on a piece of scrap paper, they’re not managing the opps. And YOU are not managing them as a salesperson. Get it into a system that allows everyone to know what’s going on with all opportunities.
3. Automation: A good opportunity management tool will do automation to keep you from neglecting your leads. At a minimum, it should alert you and the owner of the opportunity if a deal is starting to rot (i.e., has been sitting stagnant for longer than 25 days) so that you can revive it.
4. Robust Reporting Capabilities: You should be able to easily pull both historical reports and forecasting reports for criteria such as product/service, opportunity owner, revenue, loss reason, sales stage, time to close, person type, etc. It should also integrate or be a part of your CRM so you can attain closed-loop reporting for sales from specific marketing campaigns.
By effectively managing your opportunities, you will be able to stay on top of follow-up, recognize “rotting” before it goes sour, and better manage your sales team, which will expedite the close and increase your overall close rate. Let’s take a look at how this directly affects the bottom line.
A Look At The Numbers
MSP Averages:
- New Leads: 72 (6 per month)
- Appointments Sat: 35 (48% of leads end up in appointments)
- Proposals Generated: 24 (69% of appointments end up in proposals)
- Closed Deals: 12 (50% of proposals are won)
- Average 1st Year: $25,119.32
- Total Annual Payout: $301,431.84
In the past few months, we’ve looked at how to get more leads, more sat appointments, and more proposals generated (and the specific ways to do so). This month, we do a final increase by improving the number of closed deals by better managing your opportunities. Let’s take a final look at our new numbers that you could have if you were to automate parts of your sales and marketing.
Increase Number Of Set Appointments, Sat Appointments, Proposals Generated, And Closed Proposals With Tools And Automation
- New Leads: 86 — Can increase by 20% by automating the follow-up.
- Appointments Sat: 58 (68% of leads) — Can increase by 20% by using appointment booking software.
- Proposals Generated: 44 (75%) — Can increase by 6% just by streamlining your sales process and wowing your leads.
- Closed Deals: 25 (55%) — Can increase by a minimum of 5% by using a good opportunities management tool as recommended in this article.
- Average 1st Year: $25,119.32
- Total Annual Payout: $602,863.68
We have DOUBLED the total annual payout just by making small improvements to your processes and by allowing automation to do much of the heavy lifting in keeping your leads and opportunities alive.
We use and highly recommend Infusionsoft by Keap’s Opportunities Module. It is an additional module that you can add onto your existing Infusionsoft. It will be the tool to help you manage your pipeline better to get more closed deals. But don’t listen to me; hear it from your peer.
“The Infusionsoft Opportunities Module is the cornerstone of our sale management toolkit. Not only has it been one of the drivers to increase our first-time appointments, but it also allows our entire team to know exactly what the status is of all our HOT LEADS/opportunities. Both our CEO and I view and act on these reports daily. We always know exactly what is going on with our HOTTEST prospects, and it allows us to have a laser focus on what is most important in our pipeline. We can provide proactive support to our sales team in order to do what is needed to close these accounts in a timely fashion, and our close rate is increased because of the visibility we have into our opportunities! I don’t know what we would do without the Infusionsoft Opportunities Module!”
–Jim Bryce, client solutions manager at Debian IT
If you don’t have Keap and want to learn more about automating your marketing and streamlining your sales process visit: www.MSPMarketingCRM.com
