How this green manufacturing business increased his conversion rate from 12% to 22% (while freeing up his intern)

The Story of Alex

Alex is the owner of a green business that designs and builds modular eco-friendly classrooms for schools (think primary school huts but super-efficient to run and futuristic looking).

Alex’s goal was to double his revenue in the next 12 months.

Like most growing businesses Alex invested between 5%-10% of his revenue on marketing efforts.

In late 2016 Alex switched from radio and industry magazine ads to Google Adwords. The new leads were flooding the site.

This is a great situation to be in but it had one major flaw that was preventing his company from growing.

The Challenge of Creating Proposal Before Proposal Generator

Creating a new proposal took between 6-8 hours to create and send to a potential customer.

At the company's busiest point, they were receiving 15-20 qualified leads every day.

This meant it often took over 2 weeks to get back to a potential customer. There was always a backlog of proposal requests.

A junior assistant would handle putting the proposal together and sending it to the customer.

The process of creating a proposal was a mix of copying and pasting for 6+ Word documents, 3 Excel spreadsheets, and liaising with the senior engineers and project managers to sign off the custom requirements and quoted price.

Only 12% of the proposals were converted into sales.

Potential customers had gone cold or had found a competitor because of the 2-week delay in getting back to them.

This was a big obstacle getting in the way of Alex’s business from growing and he wanted it fixed.

The Solution

We developed an internal tool that created a proposal from an online inquiry, and once signed off by a senior member it would be sent to the customer automatically.

Getting the right data

Initially, the quote form on their site only had a few text input fields to capture the customer’s requirements.

We discovered we required a minimum of 26 input fields to generate a proposal.

More form fields = less conversation

We believe the above is true.

However, Clients that wanted to buy a pre-built classroom were more likely to make an extra step of filling in the additional fields. Also, it got rid of the tire-kickers.

Our job was to make the form as easy and quick to fill in as possible, so we had built an online form that could be filled in from a smart phone in under 3 minutes.

Senior team sign off

Once the potential customer had filled in the form the relevant team member would get an email notification of the lead’s requirements, custom changes and generate a quote.

If all team members were happy with the quoted price and customizations, they clicked on a link to sign off the proposal and it would be sent to the customer.

If a team member wanted to edit a quote they would click on the edit quote link which let them do exactly that before sending it to the customer.

Now quotes were getting to customers in less than 30 minutes instead of two weeks. Small tweak, massive impact.

Keep the company in the minds of potential customers with golden nuggets of information

Now that creating a proposal was down to 30 minutes from 6-8 hours, the sales team had more time to follow up with potential customers.

Before the solution, Alex’s sales team would phone potential customers up a few hours after sending a proposal.

Now the system automatically sends 4 emails every 2-3 days.

Each email is not a sales pitch.

Each email is a golden nugget of information that explains the benefits or prebuilt classrooms.

Using this approach of warming potential customers up by feeding them the right information to make a buying decision before calling them was very effective.

Now the conversion rate of proposals sent to sales increased from 12% to 22%.