Sales Mastery - How to turn more leads into sales by Steve Mills

Most businesses are not losing sales because they are generating the wrong leads. They are losing sales because they are giving up too soon.

Research consistently shows that it takes between eight and twelve contacts to convert a prospect into a paying client. Yet the majority of business owners and salespeople give up after just two, three, or four attempts — and then wonder why their conversion rate is so low.

In this video, Steve Mills — business growth expert with 31 years of experience and over 10,000 clients — walks you through the exact system he uses to convert more leads into sales, predictably and consistently.

If you want to know more from me and you want to benefit from nearly 30 years of experience helping thousands of businesses in hundreds of industries all over the world and the time that I've spent learning from the worlds leading masters in the world of sales and marketing, the next step for you is to book a one-to-one meeting with me and you can do so by going to resultsmastery.com thanks very much for listening.

Transcript

0:29

Hello, everybody, welcome. Great to have you here. Thank you for being here on my live stream. Today, uh, we're basically streaming live over uh YouTube, LinkedIn, and Facebook. But in addition to that, we're also on my podcast, which is the Results Mastery Podcast. So if you've not uh already signed up for that, then I strongly recommend you do. I'm always adding useful content, great ideas in terms of marketing, sales, and business growth. So please feel free to subscribe to that. Sorry, I've just realized I've left my mobile phone on. So that proves this is live. Uh I ought to turn it off, which I've now done. So um, yeah, really, really exciting. Um, particularly as my podcast now is on Amazon Music. It's also on iTunes and Spotify and about 30 other places, culminating in over 8,000 views per episode. So, you know, it's very exciting. You probably gather I'm reasonably excited right now and uh looking forward to sharing some great ideas with you. So today is based around uh a service that I offer called Sales Mastery, okay? And this is one of the most important things that you can do to grow your business. Now, if you're here, if you're on this, this is what we're all about. We're about helping businesses to grow. I've been doing this for 31 years. Can you believe that? I can't, I think I must have been very young when I started. Um, but seriously, um you know, 31 years working with over 10,000 businesses, and I've helped them achieve an average growth of around 45%. That's average, not all of them have grown that much. Some of them have grown far more, some of them less, but an average of 45%. So if you want to know about that and how I might be able to help you do that, then go to resultshyphommastery.com and book a free no obligation meeting with uh with me. So if you've got any questions at all, anything you want to know um during the um uh session today, uh I'll try and answer them. So just ask them in the chat and I'll uh handle everything pretty much at the end, probably. But uh if I get the chance in between, I'll uh I'll do it during the actual presentation. But uh yeah, great to have you here and uh great to uh thank you uh sincerely for uh being here and for your time. So without further ado, let's press on and start talking sales. Um, sales for some people is a little bit of a, you know, it's like a dirty word almost. You know, I'm not a salespeople person, I don't want to be a salesperson, you know, sales is not what I'm at. Um and you know, on one hand I get that, but if you ask me what's the most effective way of growing a business, uh, without any shadow of a doubt, uh I'd say increasing sales conversion rates. That's the key. Conversion rates. You know, it's how many leads do you get in, let's say, for example, in a month, how many leads do you get? And how many of those do you turn into business? Because let's say you got a 20% conversion rate now, right now, so you get a hundred leads, and that equals 20 sales. If you could improve that by 20%, so you go from 20% to 40%, which is actually a 20% improvement, isn't it? Um, what could uh you do with your business with that sort of improvement? Well, over a period of time, you could double it, you could double the size of your business by improving your conversion rate from 20 to 40, or improving it from 40 to 60 would grow it by by uh 50. Okay, so if you could do this, if you could master this, then the the potential is massive. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't be focusing on growing your business in terms of lead gen as well, obviously. Um, but there's only two ways of growing your business, and more specifically, growing your profit, which is the purpose of a business. One, you can reduce costs, and that's a good thing to do. Go and look at what you can do to save money. I strongly encourage you to do that. Being a Yorkshireman, you know, we don't like wasting money. And number two is to increase sales. Okay, there's three ways of doing that. One is you get new customers, two is you increase the average transaction value, the average amount of money each customer spends each time they buy from you. And three, you increase the frequency of repurchase. So, from a supermarket metaphor, you've got to get more people in the door of your supermarket, you've got to get them to fill their baskets more or fill it with more expensive products and services, and you've got to get them to come back to you again and again and again and buy from your supermarket. That's it. So let's talk about sales. What is it that's gonna help you get more sales? Well, number one, it's to develop a sales system. Most sales systems people say, Well, I don't really have one. Well, the truth is you do, it's just not written down and it's not very good. The sales system's something like this an inquiry comes in or a telephone call goes out, and what happens then is uh somebody follows up. Uh, that could be by email, just uh, you know, thanks for your inquiry. Somebody will be in touch soon, and then a couple of days later, somebody calls, or it could be that a call is made straight away and uh some questions are asked, and uh that transpires and moves forward, perhaps to a meeting and a proposal and a sale and so on. And that's great if that happens. But let's face it, it doesn't always happen, does it? You know, you make a call and they don't answer the phone. You send an email, they don't get back to you. You know, you you you send them a WhatsApp and they don't get back to you again. And you think after two, three, four attempts at trying to get in touch with people, oh well, they're not really interested. Let's just add them to our database and send them our quarterly newsletter, you know, and the biggest problem with that is that I hear I hear different versions of this, but the version of it basically is that it takes eight to twelve contacts to make a sale, eight to twelve contacts, and yet most salespeople or most business owners give up after two, three, perhaps four attempts. Here lies the problem. We don't keep going, we don't keep trying, we have to keep going. It takes time. You know, why didn't they get back to you? Well, you know, there's a variety of reasons, isn't there? But you know, if we keep going, that's really gonna help. Another thing that really helps is speed. Speed stuns. Speed stuns. If you respond within a minute, people go, oh, wow, oh, thanks for getting back to me so quick. Oh, that's great. Great service. Yeah, that speed stuns. You know, and we've got to develop a process. So a 12-step process that might include a load of things, that might include an initial email that auto-fires as soon as an inquiry comes in. Like three seconds later, they've got a message back saying, Thanks very much for your inquiry. Uh, on it, there might be some additional information. Uh, then the phone call, because we want to phone them quickly. So ideally, we phone it, we're on the phone within a quarter of an hour uh at the latest. Um, and we've got a script. I know I hate the word script, and you probably do too, but that's what it is. It's a list of things we're going to sell, and we're doing that in a way that we've got one mouth and two ears, yeah, and we're using it in that ratio. So we're not going on and talking, talking, talking, because that way you're a salesperson. What you're doing is you're going in and you're listening. You're listening to what they say to your great questions that you're asking them. Okay. So, again, really, really important. Now, hopefully that's going to turn into a meeting and that meeting into a sale. But if it doesn't, what are you going to do? Well, perhaps you're going to send them a copy of your testimonial brochure, which is basically 20 pages full of testimonials from satisfied customers. Uh, if you've got one of those, great. If you haven't, it might be a good idea to get one. Uh, you then might want to send them some video testimonials as well. Uh, you then might want to follow that up with a brochure or something like that, a more formal form of marketing literature. Uh, you might want to invite them to an event that you're running, okay? And then you might want to phone them up again, and then you might want to send them another email and or a WhatsApp or an SMS. You with me? And all of a sudden you've got these 12 uh stages of your sales process, and that's great. Then, and this is really important, this is sort of step two. It's one thing having the system, it's another thing implementing the system. A lot of people don't. They have a system and they don't even know what it is, alone about how to implement it. And uh, you know, we use something called high level, uh, which enables us to automate our sales system. So it's not left to the discretion of people, and I'll get round to it when uh when I'm free. It's there and it's in their face, and it happens on autopilot. So the delivery of the uh testimonial um document happens on autopilot. It doesn't happen because Steve's remembered to send that that out next. It happens after the phone calls. Once I click on my system that I've made the call, next step is nice to speak to you. Here's a copy of the testimonial book. So if you want to know about that, by the way, we are a reseller of that. It's a fantastic software getting better and better every day with AI. It's even now got AI calls. So that call that I mentioned a few minutes ago could be made with an AI. So you don't even have to get on the phone. But you know, enough about that in the future. If you want to find out about it, uh again, get in touch, go to my website, resultsmastery.com, and uh we can talk about that and how that might be able to help you. So we've got to get the training in it. Now the question is, how often should you be trained? I spoke at an event a little while ago up in uh Birmingham, and the event had around about a thousand people in it. I was up on the stage, uh, it was an all day long thing, and I was just doing a half an hour talk uh just after lunch. I had the uh the the worst time ever, you know, straight after lunch. But anyway, I went up there and I said, right, hands up, who's they're all business owners, so they weren't like you know a thousand salespeople, a thousand business owners. Hands up, who's responsible in their business to sell, to sell things? And I literally got a thousand hands, thousand hands went up. I said, okay, hands up, who's done any sales training in the next in, sorry, not in the next, in the last 12 months, and I got about 50 hands. 50 out of a thousand people. What are the other 950 people doing? Really? You've done no training for a year, and you call yourself responsible for selling in your business. Something wrong with that picture, would you agree? I then asked, who's who's had a really good year in terms of hitting target, creating sales, and so on? And you know what? Almost, not quite, but almost the same 50 people put their hand up. Now, if you ask me how often I do sales training, if you ask the top people in the world, uh uh top companies in the world how often they do sales training, do you know what they'll tell you? Every day, every single day I do sales training. For me, it happens at seven o'clock in the morning. Uh, I do 7 to 7:30. It varies. Sometimes I watch videos providing training from other sales and marketing experts. Uh, sometimes I do role plays and I record myself. Sometimes I go and look at all my questions and make sure that I know them, that they're not just on a sheet of paper, but they're actually in here, and I work out what I could do to improve them. Other times I go and think about my objections. What objections, you may ask? Well, they're things like, well, I want to think about it. I'm gonna speak to uh a couple of other companies before I decide whether I'm gonna go with you, Steve. Uh, it could be uh, you know, I've not got the budget right now, or you know, we're really busy at really busy at the moment is a really big one, actually. We're really busy at the moment. Uh give me a call in a month. And do you know what happens when I do that? Well, uh, what used to happen is I give them a call in a month and they'd either uh duck and dive to not take my call, or if they did, they were still as busy as they were a month ago. What I always do now, this is a really good tip. What I do is if they say I'll call you in a month, I'll say, yeah, uh uh absolutely. You know, if I well, what what I would say, part of my system is this. I'd say, I fully understand how busy you are, and I'm happy to call you in a month. However, there's clearly something stopping you going ahead right now. Tell me, is there anything other than the fact that you're busy preventing you from going? So they might then say, Well, yeah, it's the budget, or it's this, it's that we've got this coming up, or that's the reason, and so on. Good. What you want to always do when somebody gives you an objection, always make it the last objection. So if they said, uh, I need to speak to my partner, I'd say, okay, I fully respect that and understand. So tell me, other than speaking to your partner about it, is there anything else that you're worried about? Or you know, other than the cost, if we could get over the cost, perhaps we could split the cost into monthly payments. Uh, would would there be any other reason that you didn't go ahead? No, no, no, it's just about the cost. Yeah, so that's a really good tip. But the other tip that was going to give you is I would say if they said, if we agree that I was gonna call them in a month, I'd say, right, I'll call you in a month. So how's the uh 14th of July at 2 o'clock? Is that okay? And then I'd send them a link to put into their diary so they know on Tuesday the 14th of July at 2 o'clock, they've got a an appointment, albeit a telephone appointment or perhaps a Zoom appointment with me. You see how powerful that is? Much more powerful than just leaving it. Oh, yeah, I'll give you a call in a month's time. And probably, you know, if you've not got a really good uh CRM system like high level, you might forget, you might make a note, you might, you know, they're not in, they've gone on holiday, they're you know, and you just waste a load, a load of time. Um, and uh the other thing I I uh I'd advise is if they say give me a call in a month's time, I'd say, I'm I'm happy to do that, but tell me. Sometimes people say, Give me a co uh a call in a month's time, and actually what they mean is they're not interested. Tell me, which is it with you? I'd rather not mess around. Um, are you genuinely interested in this? They go, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. They go, well, uh, to be honest, no, I I uh I probably won't be. Okay, great. That saves me messing, saves them being hassled, and we can get on with our lives. So, so that's I think pretty much all I've got for you today. I want to be respectful of your time. We're coming up to 20 minutes. So uh if you want to know more from me, if you're looking for some training, some coaching, I run a fantastic uh group called the Results Mastermind Group. I've got a uh program called the Kickstart Program, which starts at £25 a month for startup businesses. That's all, not for established ones, £25 a month. And then I've got also a program um called the Platinum Program, which is for businesses probably turning over a million plus, where we do all the marketing for them and they outsource it to us with our designers and copywriters and AI functionality, and uh, I work as your marketing director and so on and so forth. So, if any of that's of interest, please let me know. Um, just gonna go to chat, see if I've got anything in there. Um right, okay, yeah, that's an interesting one, isn't it? People judge everybody by their accents, you know. We we do, whether we like it or not. You know, you you the late lady that uh uh uh sorry, I think it's a not sure if it's a lady or a man, uhtiza, Urtisa, I think is is the name, and um yeah, uh the the Pakistan accent. I I I do get sometimes we actually fight find it hard to understand. My my advice, and I've got a guy who works for me in India, uh I say just slow down a bit. You guys seem to speak really, really quick. So slowing down might help. I've got a Yorkshire accent. Some people can't understand what I'm saying as well. So my I suppose my number one piece of advice is just get over it, just get on with it, you know. And if people don't, you know, think you're spamming or whatever, you know, uh there's probably nothing you can do other than use an AI to make that initial call because you can just say, you know, speak in this accent, and the quality of those uh voice AIs now is just I was on a phone call the other day. I'll just tell you this quick story. I was on a phone call the other day, and this guy's trying to sell me uh a voice AI to make all my sales calls for me, and I said, uh I said, Yeah, but the trouble is with voice uh uh AI is you can always tell, you can tell it's an AI, can't you? And he said, Well, you didn't, and I went, Are you an AI? He said, Yeah, of course I am. Why would I would I would why would I use a human being to make phone calls from a company that sells AI voice? I went, oh yeah, I suppose so, yeah. So, you know, really interesting the fact that um, you know, uh the this is becoming uh, you know, uh ever more popular, really. So uh yeah, um, yeah, my pleasure. Glad glad to uh glad to help. Thanks for tuning in as well. I really do appreciate it. So uh that's it. I'm gonna finish now. Don't forget I do these every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So keep keep looking out for them. Uh if you want to message me, uh feel free to do so. Um, you can get me at Steve at um stevehyfammills.com. Uh send me a message, I'll make sure you get invited uh to the events in the future. Other than that, thanks very much.