Greg DavidsonThe amount of traffic we get on WayUp is pretty exciting for me and my team. Every day we have new businesses signing up for our site, but it’s not so exciting when those signups go dark. Our team noticed we have a lot of employers signing up without ever posting a job, so we obviously wondered where the disconnect was between the two.
I asked one of our engineers to look into the problem, and it turned out we were losing a lot of great leads directly after the initial sign up.
So how do we improve our sales conversion rates? We decided to go back to basics and make more calls.
Go beyond email – call leads right away
Every time someone signs up on WayUp, an email is sent out thanking them for signing up. But we decided an email wasn’t enough. Immediately after signup an alert goes out to my team and whoever is the first person that is free jumps on a call with the customer within 5 minutes.
Be there for your users
On average, the call lasts for three minutes. The solution here is to guide people through their questions before they know they even have them. We’re able to gather information on what type of listing is being made, what locations the clients are looking in, what the job function is and what filters they’re looking for.
Challenge your team
Some of the biggest challenges for me were things such as making sure my sales reps didn’t get out of the situation too quickly. Some people would be so surprised by the quick reach out from my sales team that some reps interpreted the response as “they weren’t ready for my call.” Because of this mindset, a lot of reps would end the call quickly, attempt to schedule something in the future, and lose that person as a potential customer. The solution here is to guide people through their questions before they know they even have them. Challenge them! You can provide value for them right there on that call.
By pushing my sales reps to explore more on their calls and gently push their potential customers towards figuring out what they really want out of WayUp, I saw the problem of resistant sales reps slowly start to disappear. This, combined with their rapid response rate to anyone signing up for WayUp was a huge contributor to the increase in customers we have experienced.
Know your success rates
Before this process started, 20% or less of signups were turning into customers. Once the calling was implemented, 50% have turned into customers with WayUp, showing that while some customers may have been surprised by the timely follow up call, most of them appreciated the customer service and found it answered questions they may or may not have known they had about WayUp.
At the end of the day, in order to make your sales team more efficient, don’t be afraid to delve further into the problem. Had we not taken a deep dive into where we were losing leads, we wouldn’t have been able to come up with a solution.
Try out different solutions, talk it out with your sales team and keep lines of communication open. You’d be surprised at how great it can be for your team and ultimately your company.
This is a guest post by Greg Davidson, Head of Sales at WayUp (formerly Campus Job). WayUp connects students with internships, part-time, and full-time entry-level jobs.
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