Ontraport in Action: How this Coaching Business Doubled Their Sales Using Automation

This is why hiring more closers are only going to cost you more than what you bargain for.

Most scaling companies earning $100k per month enrolling clients to their programs would often turn to hiring more sales persons to accommodate more appointments when faced with growing traffic of leads However, more people doesn’t necessarily = more sales. In fact, you’re at higher risk of getting much less with more cost.

A lot of the times when we aim to increase sales by twice or even thrice, we often overlook the other parts of the selling process. We would often think – scaling means multiplying actors doing the work, or increasing ads to generate more leads, rather than optimizing the systems that run within your client acquisition process.

Now, that is not to say to abandon filling critical positions completely. After considering overhead costs, management and administrative expenses that go along with hiring new persons, it is imperative to determine whether you’re slotting square pegs to a round hole.

When we think of onboarding new people we often forget that along with it comes the cost of training, managing and assimilating to the culture of the company. And those take time.

You might say, “that’s alright, they work on commissions, so no cost for me! And the position will pay for itself once they start closing.”

That’s a trap, because as easy it sounds, these people will start to carry your brand, your name and your company. They may not cost you money directly, but they do affect your company in some other way. There’s the issue of qualifying for culture fit, work ethics, agility in this ever-changing digital space. Again, whoever is accountable to your new hires – whether it be you or your manager – those competencies make an impact to the team as a whole.

If your goal is to multiply your income twice the time your team does at the moment, examine the micro-cuts where you are actually bleeding money.

I’m talking about your sales process – checkout pages, your contract signing and administrative steps, even your scheduling and lead qualifying processes.

When done right, that one step taken by your sales closers can cut their work in half and in turn double their productivity and sales, without the need to hire more, expand their calendars or you paying for yet another complex tool.

Being focused on the bigger picture, often it’s the little things done on a day-to-day, hour per hour or in this case, every closed deal or conversation that stump every business owner, executive and your talented sales people. What is that one thing we would rather NOT think about when we’re busy running the business or closing deals? YES, admin work. Those regarded as minor yet make a great impact in the grand scheme of things: contracts, check out pages and payment plans, even updating deal status following the conversation. Sales people are often required to do those additional steps in order to complete the sale, now you got your rockstars doing admin work – and then we think, they’re maxxed out!

But Joane – we can’t just skip those contracts and reports – otherwise we’d be flying blind, not only that, we’d be flying completely exposed without those legal documents locked in to protect us.

I hear you.

You’re most likely using softwares to handle these processes and while that’s another layer to add into your sales process, you trust that it’s a little cost for the pay off. It’s a necessary “evil” to see through the big picture. What we don’t realize is that those also take time to accomplish. Those little time suck cumulatively affects your bottom line.

Let’s see how…

Your sales person’s calendar can accommodate about 8-10 calls a day, 12 or more if they’re on a roll, with 15-20 minute padding in between to rest, grab a snack, OR because they’re awesome, take the customer’s credit card details, put in the payment processing page, then log in to the e-signature software, go to templates, click, click, click, input customer information – “this will just take a second..” they might say to the client, glances at the clock, realizing next call’s about to sart. They’re now faced with 2 choices, leave this customer hanging or push their next meeting and lose another chance to sell… Seems like an easy choice while reading it, but if their KPI and income depended on it – it hits different in the “battle field.” Let’s say he makes that choice, now he pings his sales lead to take over the next one, sales lead now scrambles to get the next available sales person to slot in. This possible sale becomes a moving target.

But what if, he didn’t have to make THAT choice in the first place?

First, let’s revisit the elements in play and determine whether we are putting all of them in their “zone of geniuses”

Let’s be honest, we have this notion that sales people and technology don’t mesh well. They wouldn’t be in their roles right now if it were the opposite in the first place, but AT LEAST they should be able to follow instructions, right?! This is where the problem begins, expecting them to make the tech work while doing their most important job, and we’ve been in the space long enough that tech just gets crazy at times, coupled by the fact that they’re also dealing with humans day in, day out. Not only can that be frustrating, but could also get disempowering. With all the best intentions, you may have just set them up for failure by stacking on their responsibilities, with tasks that take away time from doing their actual job- closing sales. By recognizing that and removing those time suckers off their plate, we’re not relying on your sales rep to do “other important” tasks, but we’re getting laser focused and expecting them to do what they do best.

You might decide to unload that part of the process to another person and tweak your sales process by having that admin person follow up and manage the documents. Again, you’d have to rely on this new person (or two) to keep the paper trail. More human resource, as we established early on, more complexity. Now don’t get me wrong, there is so much value a person can bring to a business at any level. Rather, I’m simply urging you to take a look at your risk of exposure. Not to mention the risk of having to back track and sift through loads of documents when a legal conundrum arises. If there’s a chance you won’t have to deal with it in the first place, wouldn’t you take that?

That’s where the next step becomes critical, mapping out your process and take stock on the resources you’re using.

Now this is not just about putting all the steps on a workflow software, you’d really have to dive deep or get your tech team to identify key processes, tool and asset that plays a role in your client acquisition. In the case of my clients, we use Ontraport CRM and other tools to handle different things.

You’d want to know these things, how tight the feedback loop is, how long does it take to complete each step, what is the contingency plan for when something breaks, what support system is available for the team to help push forward. From there you can start to ask the question, are there gaps and areas where we can tighten the process further and which platforms are redundant, and can be replaced or removed completely? Is your team the best person to handle these type of things, or do they have ideas on how these elements can be improved? What are my non-negotiables and which ones we can incorporate as a feature?

Don’t have time for this? You’d be surprised how valuable a simple documentation of your assets, organized based on your step by step process, can be for your entire company. If you’ve reached this stage in your business without relying on this, you have a very great team working behind the scenes. But while we’re talking about minimizing risks and optimizing your business, you’re leaving so much away to chance.

After identifying the areas you can consolidate or eliminate, you now have the ability to make a move from an empowered position – even if you’re not the one doing the work. We’ve had the privilege to design a new process that only requires the sales person to fill out ONE form and the rest of the steps are triggered by automation. Knowing the “end in mind” and “non-negotiable” we created a simple process that processes payments AND generates contract and updates the deal stages with just one submission, with a window for some flexibility and unusual scenarios. With a bit of creativity and a low-cost plugin, our team was able to eliminate tools that serve a similar function and also helped bring all the data back into the main platform – Ontraport CRM.

How important is all these you might ask? Simply empowering your sales persons to not be bogged down with administrative work, allowing for more space to take in calls they’d otherwise cancel or reschedule, and removing the need to pay and manage another tool while handling all the information in one central place.

Now, if you’ve reached this part and are using Ontraport CRM to manage your pipeline and want to optimize your client acquisition system to generate from 5-6 figures to seven, this is our jam. We’d love to help you multiply your revenue and increase your profit by removing clutter, tweaking your systems and freeing up your team from tasks that take them away from their zone of geniuses.

We also help migrate from a platform you’ve outgrown so you can take your business to 7-8 figures and get your A-Team working without the tech concerns.

We will deep dive on your processes, your goals and have a chat with your key players to understand how you operate using Ontraport CRM, then we will document and organize your assets into a working knowledge base, help you streamline your client acquisition, onboarding and delivery systems and strategize with you on how you can maximize the platform. We can also help train your team on how to maintain and use the system so they can feel confident and empowered to move forward.

We can start on a project typically starting at $1500 depending on the scope and complexity. If you think this is for you, let’s have a quick chat over messenger to find out if it’s a fit for you and your business.