Ask any Sales Manager, and she will tell you that her team closes 1 in 4 (or 3 or 10, whatever it is, they usually know the number). Ask a marketer what his click through rates on emails are, and again, he will know (maybe 4-5% of successful sends). But ask them how many names they need to add to their 'engine' next month, and how many deals need to close that month, and you'll probably get a "good question" response.
Ask them to give you conversion rate by stage in funnel, and they'll blink and smile. Oops.
Ask them to do this from the buyers' perspective (rather than our perspective as seller), and we won't even raise a grin. You take my point, I think.
If marketing and sales are ever to become respected management sciences around the world, we need to get good at calculating, and improving, our closure rates by stage.
In this week's show, we'll show you how to calculate your sales conversion for each stage in the buyer's journey, and how long it takes, and why lag is death.
