Long gone are the days of murky sales processes with anecdotal pain-points and hearsay-based decisions. Modern technology companies are systematizing the sales process to foster massively profitable sales engines that predictably generate revenue. The systemization of sales allows companies to gauge success of different strategic initiatives and decisions. Companies have the ability to comprehend the success or failure of certain sales strategies by tracking the sales process.
Financial planning consistently used throughout an advisor's sales process. To ensure that our customers are successful, we believe it is important for you to measure and quantify the impact that adding financial planning has to your company.
Whether you define success as additional product sales or a higher percentage of potential clients granting you assets to manage, tracking is the first step in understanding the ROI of our tools. To measure ROI, implement a client relationship management (CRM) tool, define the sales process, and determine the optimal way to track the desired initiative.
Organizing your sales process
CRM systems are at the core of the modern sales team; it holds all client data and acts as the virtual incarnate of the physical sales process. CRM systems store all the information you need, from clients contact information to recent conversation details with the client. Keeping this crucial information in your CRM enables the team to keep track of the relevant information about a potential prospect or current customer. Retaining this client information that is a vital lifeline of your business in the event that an advisor leaves the practice.
More importantly, software allows you to model real life processes, such as your sales process, to quantify and track the desired process. Next, we will define and codify the sales software into our CRM. To learn more about CRMs for financial advisors, click here..
From left to right, start listing the steps in your sales process. For example, let us make up the following sales process: First, the meeting is set on the calendar with a prospect. Then, the meeting occurs with prospect. Finally, there is negotiation and the prospect is closed won. How can you codify this into your sales process? Good CRM systems allow for you to enter an opportunity. Opportunities reflect the possibility of a sale so that the business can determine if the sale was complete.
In the opportunity, codify the sales process by crafting a field that the sales team must move through the above stages based upon the real life happenings. For example, after the meeting occurs with the prospect, the sales team is responsible to move the opportunity to stage two. How can the stages be used to guide your strategic decisions?
Measuring conversions
With a good sales operations team (to learn more about sales operations, watch the first few minutes of this video), measure the conversion rate from stage to stage. What percent of stage one opportunities progress to stage two or beyond? If a conversion rate is too low, devote resources to begin to understand how to bring the desired conversion rate higher. Next, we will look at tracking other important parts in the sales process.
Outside of the base sales process, we can start adding in additional ways to pivot over our data to gain an even more holistic understanding of our process. Referring back to the example, let us say that the first meeting is either a basic introduction or a fact-finding meeting. With the addition of another field, we can start to pivot over the data to see which meeting type is most successful at converting the prospect to the next stage in the process.
If we find jarring statistics, we can change the entire sale team’s process to drive higher conversion rates across the organization. Use this same process to comprehend the ROI of implementing financial planning, or another tool, into your practice. For example, denote which opportunities are given a financial plan.
Instilling a high-functioning sales teams starts by understanding your process, measuring your process, and making strategic decisions based upon the data. Without an idea of what is occurring in the process, how can you replicate it drive success through a large scale sales team? Partnering with Advicent, we will work with you to show you how our tools are impacting and improving your sales process.
To learn how Advicent technology can improve efficiency at your business, click here.