How much do you pay for a sale?
Don’t feel bad if you don’t know the answer—most CEOs can’t even tell you what a sale costs. Of course, it isn’t difficult to add you’re the team’s salaries, but there’s so much more involved with sales than just salaries. Supporting materials, travel, conferences—these aspects all factor into the equation.
So, what exactly does a sale cost your company?
For our purposes, we’ll discuss outbound sales. The first thing you’ll look at is total salary costs for your sales team. Then, look at all the other expenses that your outbound sales team accumulates:
- Training/coaching
- Tools (laptop, mobile phone, etc.)
- Supporting materials (brochures, samples, etc.)
- Conferences
- Travel expenses
- Management
- Incentives & rewards
Once you’ve added together all these expenses, you can divide that number by the total number of sales. Depending on the extent of your outbound sales program, this number can become terrifying in a hurry. However, unless your program has become bloated and inefficient, each of these expenses may be important to keep you sales program healthy. Without careful consideration of the repercussions, cuts that are designed to save money may actually cost you sales in the end.
Cutting Waste
As the discussion turns to cutting out waste, there’s an area of waste that you may not have considered which merits a closer look. How much time does your sales team spend chasing dead-end leads? Your sales time is forced to spend valuable time talking with people who simply aren’t interested in your product. In addition to costing you money, all that wasted time hurts your sales team’s morale. Of course, low morale leads to a decrease in productivity. It’s a vicious cycle.
The Launch Leads Difference
Fortunately, this is an area where efficiency can be drastically increased. For years, Launch Leads has been perfecting a sales structure that can be customized to fit your business to cut out unqualified leads before your sales team ever sees them. In fact, your salesperson will go from making cold calls to scheduled sales appointments with decision-makers at organizations that have already expressed interest in your product. That’s quite a leap.
With Launch Leads, your sales team’s individual conversion rates and productivity increase—so will their morale. You’ll see an increase in revenue and they’ll see a nice boost in commissions. At the end of the day, you’ll have a happier, healthier staff and a dramatic reduction in how much you pay for a sale.