Sales Strategy
Jimmy DeGroot: Your Closing Ratio is the Stethoscope of Your Business June 06, 2024 (0 comments)
Green Bay, WI--I always ask the question and not once in my history as a sales trainer has it been answered with confident assurance: “What’s your closing ratio?”
The question is usually asked over dinner when the owner is telling me business is down and what can I do to fix it? Your closing ratio is your business stethoscope, and it should be used every day.
Knowing your ratio of closed sales to customer visits tells us a whole lot about what’s going on in your business. It can tell us if traffic is down, if we need to hire more people, if we need to train more on a particular sales skill, if we need to sell more items to the people that are buying or if we need to sell higher priced goods to them. It may also tell us if we have the right inventory or if our prices are not right. If you don’t know your sales closing ratio, you’re taking a very expensive and anxiety-filled stab in the dark at solutions.
To find your daily closing ratio is simple and as of now I don’t know of an app that can do it for us. It needs to be done the old-fashioned way, with pen and paper. Simply have a daily activity sheet at your register, whenever your salespeople are through with a customer interaction, they simply fill out the following columns:
- Salesperson
- Time
- Customer
- Why In?
- Purchased Y/N
- Add-on $
- Follow Up Y/N
At the end of the day each person takes the number of visits divided by the number of Yes (Purchased) and that gives us our daily closing ratio. If you had 6 customers that day and 4 purchased, that’s 4/6 = 0.667.
If you’re wondering what you can do to get sales back on track, start using your business stethoscope to find the heartbeat of your business. Once you know that, you can make some very educated decisions.
James (Jimmy) DeGroot is a professional jewelry sales and operations trainer from the jeweler’s side of the counter. Having been in management and the jewelry business for over 20 years, Jimmy offers weekly training to jewelers nationwide via the Train Retail website. Jimmy is an AGS titleholder and specializes in training relevant and timely methods for jewelry teams. He can do a full training on making Bridal Presentations the best they can be, among many other regular training options. Contact Jimmy at jimmy@trainretail.com or call 920-492-1191.