How sales teams use CrankWheel to cut the sales cycle in half

Generally speaking, when the ticket price of a product/service in a B2B transaction is low, it shouldn’t take too many calls or meetings to land a sale.

Either a customer wants what you are selling, and can afford it, or they can’t. Unlike sales where the ticket price is in the $10,000 range; these always take more time.

The problem is, as the sales team at 411.ca, a Yellow Pages Canada brand found, even these low-ticket sales can take several calls to win new customers. Yellow Pages provide a wide range of B2B marketing services for millions of companies around the world. All of this is based on the various Yellow Pages listing/directory websites, such as 411.ca, where there are over 1.1 million Canadian businesses listed.

Often these are small and medium businesses, and many thousands of independents. Once these businesses are listed (which is free), Yellow Pages can offer them a wide range of digital marketing services to help them reach a wider audience and more customers. Services such as organic and advertising-based marketing, and a number of ways to help clients boost rankings on the platform.

Why wasn’t sales easy for the 411.ca sales team?

The advertising and sales packages the team sell to customers range from a few hundreds to a few thousand dollars a month. Individual websites can be built and integrated into these packages too.

From a sales perspective, hitting targets was not easy. The difficulty was, salespeople were constantly trying to get sales leads onto a second call to close deals. Usually this was because, although interested, sales leads wanted to see something so they knew what they were buying into.

Once a salesperson got a lead on the phone, the difficulty was arranging and then ensuring a prospect stuck to that second booked call. Before that could happen, the majority of leads wanted a sales information document sent over, and then it was a challenge to get that second call to hopefully close the deal.

Deals in this particular pipeline are largely transactional and low-ticket enough to make it easy for Canadian small business owners to go-ahead with. However, too many prospects were disappearing because of this delay between the first and second calls.

Also, the other danger is that potential customers didn’t always have time for a second call, or cancelled last minute, or forgot.

Either way, it made it awfully difficult to keep leads moving through the pipeline, causing significant attrition. A Director of Sales (who reported to the VP of Strategy & Corporate Development), who oversaw the team, needed to find a way to solve this problem.

Why is CrankWheel the ideal solution for 411.ca?

Mike, VP Strategy & Corporate Development at 411.ca, had seen CrankWheel in action, at Vendasta. He knew it would work in a high-pressure sales environment. He was also confident it would solve the problem of closing deals more quickly.

Ideally, with CrankWheel this would reduce to a single call (especially when these leads were inbound), instead of two or more, which was causing the high attrition rate.

As Mike oversaw at least three teams, two sales (inbound) and one customer service team, with around 80 between them, the solution had to work. It had to be simple. A real plug-and-play solution, in a “dial for dollars” environment, where everything has to generate a return.

“Overnight, it completely turned our business around. From the day we rolled it out, and started using it in 411.ca, sales went up”, said Mike.

“It’s so simple to use. Got an account in a matter of minutes. Spoke with the founder, then we played around with it, and after getting a budget quickly approved, the sales team was starting to use it within 2 weeks. It was super low-risk for us. It really is that simple!”

The leadership team could see the value very quickly and completely bought into it. The challenge for 411.ca was showing the sales team that the product was worth the short amount of time invested at the start to increase sales long-term.

How CrankWheel cut the sales cycle in half?

• On the 411.ca sales teams, they built a culture around CrankWheel;
• Using it for inbound calls became a KPI that sales team members had to hit;
• A mantra quickly came into force: “sending ain’t selling”;
• Instead of sending more information, salespeople were encouraged to present solutions on the first call (making it significantly easier to close on one call, instead of two or more - providing a sales lead returned for a second call);
• Training was needed to encourage the use of CrankWheel, and get them used to the way it became integrated in the sales process.

Outcome: As a result of using CrankWheel, instant screen-sharing meant that 411.ca could cut the sale cycle in half, thereby doubling close rates.

CrankWheel: Cut your sales cycle in half with instant screen-sharing. Go from two or more sales calls to one: Become a one call close sales team.