Why aren’t my sales meetings converting into customers

A good conversation isn’t the same thing as a good sales meeting.

It all started with the biscuits. Those little rectangular ones with the chocolate covering. And coffee from a proper grinder!

My sales rep couldn’t stop talking about the brilliant meeting they had with this potential customer. The decision-maker had called in one of her colleagues and they’d all had a long chat fuelled by expensive biscuits and great coffee.

Yet now I’m looking at my month end sales plan wondering where the confirmed order is. We were so confident after that meeting that the Prospect went straight into our forecast. Then…nothing.

It’s not me, it’s you. Or is it? We don’t know what’s changed and are struggling to get an answer by email to find out.

Sound familiar?

What customer problem do you fix and who does it best work for?

Let’s go back to first principles. This is really a question about your value proposition. Your product or service has probably been refined over many years, but what customers are really motivated by is something that fixes their problems.

You’ll know why people typically buy from you, but the power of this is multiplied if you can get each individual to explain what’s most important to them and why. 

Imagine you’re selling an air-conditioning unit. Some people will buy on price. Others will buy on reliability. Someone else might make their choice based on emissions and unit efficiency.

B2B buyers might simply choose the industry leader because nobody ever got fired for doing so. 

Technically what your product does is cool down a hot room. But the reason someone chooses to buy from you instead of your competitor will be determined by many choices. 

Your value proposition is how you explain the problems you most readily fix. The customer with the best biscuits might not be the person you’re best placed to help.

Maybe the problem isn’t your ability to convert conversations. It’s a question of what opportunities you thought were real in the first place.

The importance of Compelling Events in progressing sales conversations

If you’re selling air cooling systems then you might be asked to tender. In that case your customer has probably decided that increasingly hot summers mean they need a means of cooling the office. The question is who wins the tender.

But in many other industries your biggest competitor is inertia.

People are happy to offer you a brew and a biccie but it’s an exploratory chat. There are countless other things on their priority list and your project might be a “nice to do”.

A Compelling Event is something that moves them from talk to action. From exploration to decision. 

These things come in all shapes and sizes. Examples of Compelling Events can be

– An increasing number of customer complaints

– Revenue gaps that demand short-term action

– Personal KPIs that affect someone’s annual bonus

– Pressure from the Board

– Launch of a new marketing campaign or website

These are all illustrations of a business challenge that is likely to motivate the person in front of you to take action. If you can’t identify a reason to act then maybe the sales opportunity isn’t as real as you initially thought.

A request for a quote might mean No

Put yourself in the shoes of a customer for a moment. Not many people are direct enough to tell a salesperson (or company owner) that their product isn’t right for them. It might not be right now if there’s no Compelling Event. Or perhaps they can’t even foresee the time it would be right.

It’s easier to ask for a quote than to say No. It avoids the risk of confrontation and having to explain yourself. It avoids the person in front of you looking downcast on hearing the bad news.

But if you’re managing a sales pipeline it’s wasting you time and money. 

Being asked for a quote means figuring out specifications and service levels. It means working out price and profitability. If it’s for a reasonable sum then it needs a proposal document or a presentation creating. All because the decision-maker didn’t want to say No.

You diligently send off the quote, update your CRM system and then….nothing.

It might sound perverse, but one of the greatest skills of a good salesperson is being able to avoid these “opportunities”. Nobody wants a thin sales pipeline, but a thin one is more effective than an unrealistic one.

This unwillingness (or inability) to qualify out unlikely Prospects early is one of the main reasons that meetings don’t convert into sales.

It highlights why it’s crucial to have specific and detailed gate criteria before moving a Prospect from one stage of your sales pipeline to the next.

Poor quality leads or poor sales technique?

This is the argument that’s raged between sales and marketing since the dawn of time.

If your sales people are effective at qualifying out unlikely leads then you could be left with a thin pipeline.

Sales will report that they could deliver more business if they weren’t wasting time filtering out the weak leads delivered by marketing.

Marketing will argue those leads were all qualified so the problem is the weak selling technique of the sales team.

The argument to prove one side right or wrong isn’t winnable. The important thing is to fully understand what a good lead looks like. Get both teams to agree who the company really wants to be selling to, where those people can be found and what it is that’s most likely to convert them.

This will speed up your sales cycle and reduce the number of ineffective meetings.

Tactics that convert sales meetings to sales results

As we’ve described above, this is as much a strategic question as it is about tactics. If you target the right customer with a precise proposition – and do so with skilled people – then your chances of success improve.

If you’re not doing this then there’s a risk you are forcing the speed you want to sell on top of the speed people want to buy.

That’s guaranteed to result in a proportion of your meetings going nowhere.

All the same, there are some tactics you can employ to improve your chances of success.

The first thing is to ensure you make clear to your potential customer what you think next steps should be by signposting your sales process.

Too often people are reluctant to ask for the sale so don’t make it clear what the customer needs to do and by when. That just leaves money on the table and allows inertia to win the deal.

As a rule of thumb all customer materials (presentations, webinars, newsletters and so on) should have a call to action (CTA). Something that encourages the customer to interact with you.

Bringing this to life, a small Yes might be better than a No.

A small request might be having them sign up to your newsletter or agreeing to grab a coffee at the next industry event. It’s not a deal yet but it’s a commitment and it deepens your relationship.

You need to figure out those customers who you think have long term value to you. Maybe they’ll become a great client if you’re patient. But do avoid the ones who could just be stringing you along.

Why don’t sales meetings convert to deals?

Of course there are many factors in this, some of them things outside of your control like market conditions or the economy.

But you can improve your ratios by taking control of your customer strategy. The better your targeting and the capability of your sales people, the more effectively you’ll qualify in the best Prospects and qualify out the time wasters.

The truth is, the number of meetings you win isn’t bankable. Success is measured by the number of opportunities you create, not by the number of meetings.

If you want help improving the effectiveness of your sales pipeline then drop us a message here.