How to Increase Your Sales Close Rate By Up to 250% (The Ultimate Guide)

What’s the Secret to Improving Your Close Rate?

After working with countless companies over the years, we've found that increased sales conversion rate boils down to the following strategies, no matter the structure of your sales team—inside sales, outside sales, inbound sales, outbound sales, etc:

Make More Calls To Prospects

More exposure equals more conversions. Every sales development representative knows this.

Sometimes the simplest way to improve your sales close rate is simply to make more sales calls to prospects. If you’re not making enough calls, or if you give up too early and have fewer follow-ups or touchpoints, you'll close fewer deals as a result. It’s a numbers game.

Third party logistics shipping company, Unishippers used PhoneBurner to quadruple their call volume metrics. Account executives went from making between 50-75 calls per day to making over 200. This explosive productivity led to increased earnings for the business. VP of Sales Kevin Biagi shares, “We’ve increased our revenue over the last 5 years substantially.” The company has over $1.6 billion in sales.

To boost their team productivity, Unishippers used PhoneBurner’s power dialer. The easy-to-use, cloud-based software allows users to multiply their call efficiency, helping each salesperson to power dial up to 80 leads per hour. With that increased call capacity, you’re virtually guaranteed to find and convert more opportunities. Learn more about our power dialer software here.

Kevin says, “I would absolutely recommend PhoneBurner to anyone looking to increase their revenue, increase sales close rate ratio, increase activity, and create a better systematic process or approach.”Read more about Unishipper’s story here.

Streamline Low-Value Tasks

Another way to improve your sales close rate is to eliminate time-wasters. This frees up your sales people to focus on the most important and high-value tasks.

One of the biggest time-wasters is leaving voicemails for prospects. On average, it takes 45 seconds for a voicemail system to pick up and then another 30 seconds to leave a meaningful message. It may only amount to 1:15 but over the course of a day, those minutes add up to a lot of wasted time.

That’s what online “For Sale by Owner” platform Fizber discovered. Their sales reps were losing a lot of time each day by leaving manual voicemails. They also lost time after each call taking notes and categorizing leads.

Fizber took advantage of PhoneBurner’s robust suite of features to increase productivity in just the first two months. Sales reps also increased live calls percentage with the help of PhoneBurner. No longer bogged down by manual tasks, agents could make more calls that ended in a higher percentage of closed opportunities. 

“PhoneBurner basically cut out 30-40% of the effort that the sales team invested... which is now devoted entirely to sales calls,” explains Melissa McKeever, VP of Sales and Customer Relations. “Because of how easy it is to use, and how streamlined it makes that whole process... full-time callers probably talk to anywhere between 80 and 120 people a day, which is really awesome.”

Read Fizber’s story here.

Systematize Your Processes

When Hector Montalvo started a new career as a Knights of Columbus insurance agent, he needed a way to stay on top of all of his sales outreach. He had over 800 contacts who required regular communication. 

For Hector, manual dialing was too slow and repetitive and certainly not the best way to work. He was spending more of his day dialing and handling post-call workflows than actually speaking to his customers. And then there were follow-up calls and emails to contend with. It was impossible to keep up with it all.

He turned to PhoneBurner to systematize his outreach, and used an intelligent foldering system to simplify  follow up cadence, auto-populate targeted call lists, and prospect without call reluctance.

Hector increase call volume and conversations dramatically using PhoneBurner’s power dialing solution. 

He shares, “One person can make these calls and schedule close to 400 appointments per month. You’re able to turn over every rock in your database.”

Hector was so successful that he started his own side business, helping fellow insurance agents improve their productivity and reach more contacts each month. Hector’s company Smart Calls is now an approved vendor for Knights of Columbus Insurance division.

Read Smart Calls success story here.

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Follow Up Based on Behavior

It’s important to respond to your customers. Set up behavioral triggers and dramatically improve your sales outreach.

That’s what business financing startup CapFront did. In an effort to deliver amazing customer service, CapFront used PhoneBurner to monitor customer behavior and create a slick follow-up system that ensured prospects were fully engaged and well nurtured.

CapFront president Zack Fiddle shares, “[PhoneBurner has] given us more of an opportunity to multitask and be efficient… It’s like we each have six hands instead of two.”

Here’s a glimpse into how CapFront uses PhoneBurner to improve their initial productivity and close more sales:

Zack used PhoneBurner and its integrations with other tools like MailChimp and Hubspot to create cadences based on clicks, email opens, custom fields, and other triggers. He was able to use PhoneBurner to simplify their workflow while still delivering the attention that CapFront is known for.

Read about CapFront's story here.

Improve Sales Conversion Rate With Workflow Automation

Red Spiral is a Phoenix-based real estate investment firm. The company was struggling with a disorganized sales outreach process leading to lower qualified leads and not the best sales close rates. 

They tried dialing manually and also with an automated dialer, but maxed out at 7,000 calls per month, well below what they needed to succeed.

Co-Founder JT Smith III decided to turn to PhoneBurner with a goal of making 10,000 calls each month. "They pretty much shattered" that initial goal, eyeing nearly 20,000 calls each month in short order. The result?  Calls, callbacks, and contracts all surged, giving the firm its first month with 3 inked deals.

The secret to their success was in workflow automation. They configured the PhoneBurner system for different reps, different call campaigns, and different lead sources. This meant that leads automatically flowed to the right accounts. Sales agents could also instantly move contacts to folders for following up or closing with the click of a button.

Learn more about Red Spiral's experience here.

Clean Your List

There are a lot of hidden bottlenecks in your day that will lower your sales team productivity. Web design and digital presence marketing firm Milestone Inc. found that one of the biggest impediments to productivity was the need to clean prospect records. It was tedious but necessary. 

Milestone decided to try PhoneBurner due to its ease of customization. The Milestone team integrated PhoneBurner into their Salesforce power dialer software, which allowed sales reps to dial contacts without leaving their CRM. This allowed Head of Inside Sales Joe Morford to instantly measure key performance metrics. 

They also took advantage of PhoneBurner’s integrated Google search function to review contact records and validate data during dial sessions. This increased productivity and eliminated manual functions that typically took place between calls. 

The result? Milestone raised call volume metric and also saw a 250% increase in demo requests.

Joe boasts, “They’re making up to 550 calls per day, each. That’s quadruple what they were doing on a good day.” With a cleaner, more refined list, his reps are happier, and hitting numbers faster.

Learn more about Milestone here.

Increase Touch Points For More Qualified Leads

The more you contact prospective customers, the better your chances of closing a deal.

That’s what mobile-powered gas and auto service delivery company Yoshi learned.  As a company providing a service people were largely unfamilar with, Yoshi had a backlog of sales leads that need to be educated about their new service. They also needed a way to stay in touch, and continue educating their existing customers.

The answer was to use PhoneBurner. With PhoneBurner, Yoshi’s co-founder Dan Hunter was able to automatically distribute 40,000 contacts to his agents. Agents were then able to increase touchpoints, making it easier to mount an effective education campaign. After reaching a peak of nearly 10,000 calls per week, Yoshi has seen incredible growth. 

Dan shares, “PhoneBurner has been great for our growth strategy. It was fundamental. We’ve been growing like crazy.”

Read Yoshi's success story here.

Final Thoughts

So there you have it, when you have the right solution for your sales outreach efforts then productivity is least of your concerns. We looked at the many ways that having the right dialing software can help to:

• Make more calls to prospects
• Streamline low-value tasks
• Systematize your processes
• Help follow up based on behavior
• Improve sales conversion rate with workflow automation
• Clean your contact list
• Increase touch points for more qualified leads

You can find all these powerful suites of features and many more with PhoneBurner’s outbound dialing solutions to increase productivity, automate manual tasks, and close more sales.