How to win new business: 5 strategies that will change your CRO

At the end of your sales funnel, we have what every business desires; the conversion. This is the part where a prospect becomes a customer, however often there is a steep drop off between an enquiry and a sale. CRO is related to this and optimising it will lead to more effective sales.

‍What is CRO?

CRO stands for conversion rate optimisation. Your conversion rate is often presented as a ratio or percentage that shows you how many enquiries or leads, then convert into paying customers. By optimising this conversion rate, you can make your sales funnel more efficient and therefore make more money.

One crucial part of CRO is understanding what is converting into sales and what isn’t. By reviewing this data, you can see if there is a bottleneck, a problem in your sales funnel, an issue with leads, or something else. Ironing out the processes paves the way for more sales.

Looking at your CRO also helps you measure success of things like; your sales team, your internal software, your lead generation processes or your marketing strategy.

When you have identified your conversion rate it is important to put a strategy in place to optimise it. So, how can you win new business by optimising CRO?

5 Strategies to win new business

1. Define a clear value proposition

What is a value proposition? A value proposition shows your potential customer why they should use you and why you are better than your competition. Gathering this information together can be overwhelming, especially if your information gathering processes are manual, you use multiple software for outputting or storing information, or you have no way to succinctly display your data to your prospect. You can make this process much easier using Shark software to create a business case that provides this information in a single place in an easy to read format. Remember, it’s not just about being able to talk-the-talk, it’s about being able to demonstrate your worth with correctly estimated figures.

2. Set up your marketing team to generate leads

Generating new leads is imperative for increasing your sales revenue so setting up your marketing team to support this is crucial. If you are looking to grow as a business then you will need to reach out to brand new prospects, not just your old ones. Your marketing team should support this by advertising on multiple channels to help leads come to you, rather than your sales team keep having to reach out to them.

Both your marketing team and your sales team should have a solid structure to follow in order to optimise your CRO, by analysing results together, you can better optimise for that all important conversion.

3. Ensure you have solid sales systems and processes in place

Processes and systems help ensure that once your leads are in they are optimised at every point of their customer journey. This makes for a happy customer and an optimised CRO.

Think of your leads as if they are sat on a conveyor belt; after the marketing team has generated a new lead, it’s time to pass that lead back onto the conveyor belt to move along to the sales team for them to close. One of the biggest failures in a conversion strategy is for leads to not be followed up, so it’s essential to make sure this is done and that it’s really clear to all team members involved.

Ensuring you have solid processes in place will help give your team something to follow and to ensure nothing is missed out along the way.

4. Devise clear sales material to win new business

A strong presentation when talking to a potential customer will help increase the chances of you winning their business. Our software creates easy to follow presentations that look highly professional and will impress your customers. Once you input your data, our software does the hard work for you, outputting business cases in a variety of formats to suit your needs. This saves a lot of time and causes less overwhelm for your team when juggling lots of data. Having this documentation on hand after export helps improve your CRO by having it available for referral as and when needed.

5. Ensure the team buy-in to your strategy

Your team needs the time to fully understand and buy-in to your strategy.

Positive business growth stems from a marketing and sales team who are 100% aligned, focussed on generating new leads, making sales and hitting targets. With a team who are highly motivated, they are more likely to continuously put in the effort to do their part of improving your CRO.

You’ve put all these strategies in place, so what now?

You can always keep improving. Hitting a CRO of 100% is unlikely but by testing new and improved optimisation strategies you can continuously improve and understand your sales funnel better. You can learn what works, what is less effective and how to drive sales forward most efficiently.

If you’re struggling with creating a business case for your potential customers, try using Shark software to help you reach your goals.