You set a team goal for your net sales per lead issued (NSLI). And, you’ve accomplished it. Well done!
But, now what?
How do you keep the ball moving so your window and door sales team doesn’t get complacent? How do you continue to grow your business now that your NSLI is booming?
In this article, we finish our three-part series on how window companies can effectively measure their lead generation efforts by showing you what to do once your NSLI rates are finally high.
As a window and door dealer, if you’ve reached your NSLI goal with your sales team, that’s an achievement worth celebrating.
But what can you do next to keep growing your business?
A high NSLI is excellent, but your business will stagnate if you aren’t capitalizing on the potential returns.
One of the first things you need to do is focus on growing your team. You're in a great position to grow if you’ve managed to get a high NSLI. You’ve got your sales system running effectively, but you’ve got to keep adding people to it.
You need to continue investing in more sales pros if you want to grow your window or door business. After hiring more people, if you see your NSLI is still high, keep investing in more sales pros to handle your incoming leads.
According to a recent Gallup research, only 36% of U.S. employees are engaged in their workplace.
If you want to continue pushing the needle with your window and door business, you must look at new ways to motivate your team.
So, how do you keep your sales team motivated if you’ve already reached a substantial NSLI goal?
Increase the incentives for your sales team. It’s easy to start with bonuses. Everybody loves surprise money. But, this can get old, believe it or not. You need to explore other ways to maintain motivation in the workplace.
One way to do this is by taking the ceiling off your commissions.
Harikesh Nair and Sanjog Misra conducted a study to look at the impact of putting a ceiling on sales reps' pay. A standard commission model to control costs is to cap commissions once a salesperson reaches a certain quota.
However, Nair and Misra found that when salespeople were capped, they underperformed. However, when the ceiling was removed, it increased business revenues by 9%.
Another way to incentivize your team is with other incentives like prizes, gifts, and even vacations. You could even set up a rewards program. While many companies will reward customers with points to redeem based on purchases, you can give your team points based on sales.
Your salespeople can spend their points on different rewards like a set of golf clubs or a family vacation to Hawaii.
Another plan of attack once you’ve hit your NSLI goal is to focus on automation.
If you want to grow your business in today’s day and age, then it’s nearly impossible without leaning on the right technology.
Your sales process likely has many moving parts and complexities. By relying on automation tools, you can manually hand off tasks that you or your sales team handles throughout the week over to a tool to do the work for you.
This can help free up time so your sales team can reach new leads. Plus, it can give you a chance to take some time off. Or, if you’d prefer to keep moving the needle, you’ll now have more time to work on high-level activities that will grow your business.
Once your NSLI is where you want it to be, you’ve done a great job of optimizing your revenue per lead.
But, at the end of the day, you could be bringing in plenty of revenue, but your business will struggle if your profit margins are struggling.
Another great metric you can get your sales team onboard with is your sales expense ratio.
This is simply your company’s total variable expenses divided by your total net sales. To get a percent from this, multiply it by 100.
For example, let’s say your net sales are $6.5 million, and your variable expenses are $2.2 million. Your expense ratio would be:
$2.2 million / $6.5 million x 100 = 33.8%.
Your goal should be to reduce your expense ratio as much as possible. You're working on your profit margins by zeroing in on this new metric. The lower the expense ratio, the higher your profits will be.
Another angle you should consider is less about your sales team and more about your marketing strategy.
Remember, net sales per lead issued (NSLI) is all about lead generation. Once you’ve hit your NSLI goal with your current strategy, you should start testing out other lead sources.
For instance, if email and paid ads have been filling your pipeline, you should try new ones to see what works for your audience. You could begin testing out social media marketing or focus more on an inbound marketing strategy with content marketing.
While NSLI is all about revenue, the right lead source could give you an edge in profitability.
If you’re looking to optimize your lead generation strategy to reach new heights in your business, you should reach out to trusted lead generation experts.
At Rizen, we’ve created a proven window lead generation system: SmartLeadGen. This program was specifically designed for home services companies to help you:
If you want to take your Window and door business to the next level, contact us today!