How to figure out what is holding you back

Had a call with an agency owner yesterday.

Quite often agency owners have these beliefs they have ‘learned’ from specific gurus in the space.

‘My offer is saturated’

‘I need to add more services to stand out’

'I can’t book calls because my lead gen sucks…I’m working with an agency blah blah’

Things of this nature.

So I just said “open your Smartlead account and show me the stats.”

And the truth is, they weren’t even bad.

Probably had about 100 or so positive replies in the inbox over the last 60 days.

Immediately I said “you do not have a lead gen problem” - it is clear that he is getting leads - these people are interested.

It is (quite obviously) a lead to booking rate problem.

This specific agency owner was having some financial trouble, and had only booked 3 sales calls in the last few months.

Despite having over 100 interested replies.

To someone who is aware, it is abundantly clear that the issue is the lead to booking rate.

But, when you’re in the weeds of your business, it can be hard to see what is going wrong.

Three things he can immediately implement to increase this:

• Faster speed to lead, i.e respond faster to these leads

• Warm call the replies within 5 minutes of their response

• Consider the angle of the email - for example, a positive reply can be a vanity metric, and it may not indicate buying intent. As a result, you need to be conscious of what types of replies you are optimising for, and then consider the sales process that would be required to convert that type of lead. If you get a reply saying “yes please, give me a free audit” it is very different to “yes I have this problem, how can I fix it” - in this sense you may have a low lead to booking rate due to what you are offering the prospect.

The major lesson though, is that you need to know what is holding you back. The only way to figure this out is by knowing your numbers.

I know immediately when looking at the numbers that X means Y.

This shows me exactly what to do when different scenarios arise, just like the above.

You can implement this across your business to make data driven decisions and consistently remove the bottleneck that is holding you back.

The result? Month on month growth.

Namaste.