10x Your Close Rate, Fix These 3 things.

Do you prefer to watch instead? A recorded a video of me narrating the newsletter HERE.

A CEO of a professional services firm called me and said, "Si, we've got a problem. We've got 15 proposals out, half of which are ghosting me, and the other half we simply can't close. We need your help."

I agreed to help. I fixed three things, and turned those deals around. Four of them closed and generated £250,000 of revenue inside three months. Here's how.

The first thing I did was sit down and pull those 15 proposals apart. What were they selling, how were they selling it, and who were they selling to.

What I found wasn't really a closing problem. Three things stood out.

First, this firm were taking meetings with pretty much anyone who agreed to a discovery call, without qualifying whether they could actually make the decision and sign off. Second, the discovery wasn't deep enough. The right questions weren't being asked, the real pain wasn't being unearthed, no urgency, no timeline, nothing for anyone to focus on. Third, because of how complex the service was, there wasn't enough time built in to properly earn trust before quoting proposals of enterprise level.

So I fixed three things.

1. Got a lot more rigid about who I'd take meetings with. Whoever we spoke to had to hit certain criteria, enough seniority to sit inside a decision-making unit.

2. Created a discovery call playbook, a structure that could be easily repeated, containing a set of non-negotiable questions that must get asked in that first meeting.

3. Introduced a paid discovery audit, which allowed us to go deeper, at a much lower price point, and earned trust early. That meant the proposals that followed were structured, specific, and tied to a real business outcome with a real timeline.

The CEO and his team went back to all 15 stalled opportunities and offered the audit. 8 of them responded immediately and said yes straight away. That's a big turnaround, since most of them were ghosting him. Of those 8, four became paying customers, worth more than £250,000, inside three months. Another two came in later in the year for a further £100,000. The remaining ones should never have been offered proposals in the first place, and were eventually marked as "closed lost."

The audit became a permanent part of the sales process after that. Close rate went up 75% and the pipeline became a lot more predictable.

Pause and Reflect.

What are we learning here? It's making sure you're talking to people who can actually make decsions. It's about asking the real questions that unearth pain and a realistic timeline in which to fix that pain. And it's about adapting the process to meet your customers where they are. A paid audit lowered the investment threshold, creating a transactional relationship, and at the same time meant the proposals were much deeper and became enriched with the realities of the problems inside that business.

A discovery process should be considered an "always on" process, never a "one and done."

Every time you get the chance to speak to a prospect, that's a chance to learn more about their business, what's making it tick, and what's holding it back. Get that right, and closing starts to sort itself out. You can tell early on who's going to move things forward and who's just kicking tyres. Proposals go out with outcomes tied to where that prospect's business really is.

Now… take a look at your own pipeline and be really honest with yourself:

a) How many proposals have you shipped that were never properly qualified?

b) How many of those proposals were sent to buyers who don't really have the clout to effect a decision, and are ghosting you because of it?

c) If a deal in your pipeline died tomorrow, would you know exactly why, and exactly who to turn to to fix it?

If you're a founder who knows your close rate should be higher than it is, I'd love to talk it through with you to see if there's room to work together. Just reply to this email.

If you'd like more insights like this, there's a large volume of free content on my insights page, HERE.

Simon
Founder, Revenue & Beyond