Losing bookings is not as unusual as you might think. In fact if you think about it, assuming that there are competitors in your market, it is unlikely if not impossible for you to get an booking for every enquiry that you receive; otherwise there would be no competition. As much as you might like the idea that there are no competitors in your market, it is actually a good thing, but that’s for another article.
But in order to survive in business and be more successful than you currently are, there are a few things that you proably ought to be doing. Here are a couple of things that come pretty high up on the list:
First you could work on your lead generation processes, which could include improving your web site, thinking more carefully about whether your site encourages people to buy from you, or some search engine optinisation to get your rankings higher and more visible. The top 3 search results on Google or any of the other search engines gets around 80% of the attention, so this is what you need to be aiming for.
Secondly you should be looking at your sales converstion rates; that is how many of the enquiries you receive are converted into bookings and whatever that rate is today, refining your sales processes to improve on that. But in order do do any of this, you will need to be looking more closely at your systems, recording more about what you are doing and performing some kind of data mining, transformation, analysis and reporting.
A client of ours in the travel industry recently contacted us wanting to find out more about how they could improve their conversion rates. We have worked with them for a few years and together we set up a comprehensive cloud based customer relationship management system (CRM), so all the information from initial enquiry to booking is collected; with over 2,000 enquiries a year and a conversion rate of around 20%, they have a lot of data from the last five years. They knew that if they were to improve their overall conversion rate by just 1%, that would result in a direct increase to their profit of over £36,000. The client wanted to analyse all of the data from their CRM system to identify areas of inconsistency between sales people and to have a set of mangement reports for enquiry and staff performance that could be easily updated at any time.
Looking through thousands of rows of data from multiple tables within a database is not something you can do without some sort of plan. The following is a summary of the steps taken:
The first thing we did was validate the accuracy of the data; we already knew from setting up the system the scope of the data, which is really comprehensive. Their CRM system had the ability to track all of the enquiries the company received together with dates and the sales agent that was assigned, all the way through to the point at which the enquiry was lost or a booking was taken. After some short investigations and discussions with the client it was confirmed that all of the enquiries had been categoried correctly, the sales person assigned and the status of the leads had been kept up to date.
The data is all held in a SQL database, so using a secure connection we were able to write some SQL queries to extract different sets of data. The first of the findings was that around 10% of all enquiries received were for products or services that the company either could not or did not want to supply. This at least on paper meant that the conversion rates (if these irrelevant enquiries were ignored), were actually higher than originally thought, although this in itself did not actually improve performance or profitability but it was important to exlude these from the data. Of the data sets extracted, the biggest and as it turns out most useful was the enquiry data together with:
Even with this small single data set extracted a huge amount of analysis could be performed and the some of the reports from this data form the weekly management information that is being used to monitor the company performance today. From this limited data extract, quite a number of reports were produced to see what if any differences or anomolies could be found, specifically conversion rates for:
In part 2 of this article we will look a the findings and subsequent actions that were taken and the benefits gained from those actions.
