A guide to sales conversion rates

What is a conversion rate in sales?

Sales conversion rates are a metric that allow you to see the percentages of leads and enquiries that convert into sales or purchases. It’s an important figure as it shows how successful your sales efforts are and whether there’s room for improvement. Conversion rates also allow you to see how the business is performing month on month, spot where there are dips in sales success, identify why they happened, and prevent them from happening again in the future.

When calculating sales conversion rates, you need to think about what it is that you’d like to track the conversion of. You may want to track actual sales from leads, or simply completed goals, such as filling out an online form, replying to an SMS text or clicking a certain button. You may want to split the conversion rate into conversions from certain channels, such as online vs. social media to compare the two and find the most successful channel. Having multiple conversion rates is always useful for this reason.

How to calculate sales conversion rates

To calculate a sales conversion rate to enable lead management reporting, you can simply divide the number of successfully converted leads by the total qualified leads, and then multiply this number by 100 to get a percentage.

For example, if the number of qualified leads is 400 and 65 of these convert to sales, you can do the following: 

65 ÷ 400 * 100 = 16.25%

The same calculation can be used to work out conversions from website clicks. You can divide the number of conversions by the number of clicks in the same way to work out the percentage of people who purchase something through a link or enquire by clicking on a button. 

Alternatively, you could use software that calculates conversion rate for you, particularly when it comes from various channels.

What is a good sales conversion rate?

A good conversion rate is probably lower than you might expect. It’s not common to successfully convert 80 or 90 per cent of the time, instead you’re probably looking at anything between three and ten per cent. This number will range from business to business, and it’s a good idea to work out your own conversion rate and find what is ‘normal’ for you.

How to improve conversion rate

When you aim to improve your sales conversion rate, you’re essentially trying to get more sales from the same number of customers, rather than increasing the volume of leads or traffic to the website. To do this, a process called conversion rate optimisation (CRO) can be applied, which is where a site is analysed to find out why customers aren’t converting. Once this has been determined and some solutions considered, some A/B testing can begin to see if doing ‘X’ improves conversion rate compared to doing ‘Y’. But, what improvements can you consider making to improve conversion rate?

Implement lead management software

Lead management software allows you to track and identify where leads have come from, enabling you to identify the areas of your site where customers interact the most. This can provide useful insight to identify where improvements need to be made to help you increase web conversions.

When it comes to managing your leads, using a powerful CRM with automated actions allows you to easily nurture leads and monitor how they interact with your efforts. A user dashboard is also a useful feature to have, with all upcoming tasks, activities and customer communication pending your reply in priority order. Having all of these things in one handy place ensures nothing is ever missed and allows you to respond to warm leads quickly and convert them into sales.

Lead management reporting can also provide additional insight such as where leads are in the sales funnel. This analysis will highlight where performance is strong or weak, and where there may be opportunities make further improvements.

Switch up your offers and sales

One surefire way of getting people to buy something is by offering some kind of promotion, offer or sale. Whether it’s an additional 10 per cent off, free delivery or a gift when you refer a friend, people will likely want to snap these offers up. Just remember that this may raise your conversion rate temporarily, and you’ll likely need to think of something else the next month..

Reduce the amount of clicks

The harder a customer has to work to make a purchase or an enquiry, the more likely they are to leave your website. This means that if they have to jump through too many hoops and make too many clicks, they may just give up altogether. This is not what you want when trying to increase your conversion rate.

Therefore, have a think about how a goal can be completed in fewer steps. Are there any steps that can be removed or made easier?

For example, the goal might be for a lead to click on a button that reads ‘Get a Free Quote’. The customer must enter an email address or phone number as a minimum so that they can be contacted. However, if the form asks for too much information, such as their name, address, how they found the website, how they heard about the brand, if they can be contacted with marketing information, when they’re available for a call and what their budget is, they may be put off completing the free quote submission. The conversion rate could be improved by making the whole process much simpler.

Written by Lauren Shaw, Marketing Manager at FLG.