Mystery Shop Your Business
Running a small business is like creating a complicated machine. Whether you are building the machine from the ground up or running a machine that was built by someone else. Each piece has a function and throughput. It takes in some resource and outputs something else. When you find that two people are handling the throughput that could be handled by one person, you have to address the redundancy. Managing the business, or just a part of the business is like tinkering with the machine to make sure it runs smoothly and efficiently.
Not only does each piece of the machine have it’s own resource that feeds it, but the business as a whole has resources that it must consume in order to keep the machine from stalling out and ultimately failing. The main resource that the business needs to keep moving is, of course cash. Cash from existing customers and even more importantly, cash from new customers.
Your company’s sales team is the piece of the machine that is in charge of processing those new customers into revenue. This, it would seem, is a bit of throughput upon which the whole endeavor largely depends.
So how’s that going? It’s common for sales managers and small business owners to look at the output from a sales team and draw conclusion about effectiveness based only on the end results, i.e., Are they hitting their quotas? Are their close rates good?
But what kind of experience are your leads having? The author of this article suggests that business owners should “Stop Wasting Leads! Mystery Shop Your Business.” This is great advice. I think business owners and managers would be surprised at how ineffective lead follow-up often is. Here’s a recent study of ten major insurance carriers that shows that grades their lead response. The average grade for the ten carriers was a C-minus. Even the few carriers who did well had areas where they underperformed, i.e., Speed-to-Contact.
Mystery shopping your company is a great idea. This simple experiment can help you find out how well your sales agents are handling incoming leads, and how much money is being left on the table at this critical stage of your company’s overall operation.
