Long, long ago when I was in the life insurance field, there were some numbers that we were told to live by.
In this age of internet marketing it’s easy to think that just because, in theory, the world can beat a door do our website and buy everything in sight, that they actually might do so. It rarely works out that way.
What the numbers meant was that. on average, for every 10 referred prospects, you would get 5 appointments, find 3 to be qualified buyers, and one actual new client.
Here’s what those terms meant.
The 10 are referred prospects. These are not names at random or from lists but names from real live people from other people. They can start out as your own “warm market” but ultimately if you’re in direct selling you’ll be working with referrals provided by others. They are the names generated by questions like “Who do you know who could use the __________ we’ve talked about?”
The 5 are folks you actually get to sit down with and “qualify” the folks. Of the 5 people you actually meet, only 3 will be “qualified” to buy meaning that they have the moral and financial qualities to do business with you. That means that they care about their family (moral) and have money to buy insurance (financial). Note, you can get referrals from all 5, not just the 3 who are qualified.
Of the 3 “qualified” prospects, on average, 1 becomes a new client family and this may involve several sales.
The numbers changed drastically depending on the quality of the “leads” that went into this system.
For instance, if you were just cold calling people at random from the phone book, the “10″ could easily become 200 to still get 1 new client.
But, we were told, if the ratio of qualified prospects to new clients (3:1) ever decreased below 33%, we probably weren’t talking to enough new prospects!
If you’re in direct sales, it could be your numbers will be very similar to the 10-5-3-1 ratio if you’re honest.
We tend to think we can “do better” than these numbers online.
If you’ll notice though, in the above system (proven by years of statistics from the man who popularized the system) produced 10% conversion rates.
When you look at web traffic, we think things are easier because we’re not having to deal with the rejection of calling people for an appointment and hearing “no”.
But when you look at the web traffic, it tells another story.
If you are using Sitemeter.com as your statistics tool, it’s helpful to click on “By Details”. There you can see how long your unique visitors are really staying!
Click on the number of the visitors staying for more than a few seconds and you’ll learn alot.
So many visitors click, don’t immediately find what they want, the bam – they’re gone.
The ones you want to pay attention to are the ones who stay 30 seconds, a minute, 5 minutes, and 10 minutes.
See where they came from, what they were looking for (through the keywords used or the referring link), and ask yourself what you can do to make those pages convert better.
These are the “10″ (or the “200″) that result in new clients.
It’d be nice to get every visitor staying for hours and buying like crazy, but if that happens it’s probably because you only showed your website to your mommy!
The best converting sites may perform like a direct mail letter and get a 1% or 2% response.
But if you know your numbers, where your “buying” traffic comes from, and how to get more, that’s all you need.
The question is – do you have your own version for your business of the 10-5-3-1 strategy?
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