If you were a business owner, would you rather have your sales department closing on average 50% of the leads they run or 35%? At first glance this seems like a stupid question, obviously the higher the close rate translates into more sales, right?
We recently had this discussion with one of our home improvement clients. Last year his company ran 2500 appointments and installed about 1200 jobs — 48% close rate. The sales manager was very proud of the fact that his team’s close rate was as high as it was. This is a home improvement company that does a lot of advertising on radio and outdoor billboards, so the phone is ringing constantly with people looking to set an appointment.
What we realized very quickly was that the company spent a lot of time on the phone with each caller. They were extremely selective about which appointments they set and ran. As a result a lot of potential appointments were never set, because the company determined — over the phone, that the home improvement prospect either “wasn’t ready” or “wasn’t worth running.” We find this over qualification of sales inquiries to be a common practice among too many home improvement companies today.
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