Conversion Rates Can Kill Your Program

What happens after a campaign or event? There’s a great feeling that comes with a successful marketing program – in my case, it’s usually a live educational event, but it might also a webinar or calling campaign. I just received an email from one company I’ve been working with over the past several months – his recent event netted about 32 assessments! He’s about halfway through the first phase, and reports some alarming findings…something I am not surprised to hear. The next step is delivering the results. This is a critical step in the process; one not to be taken lightly.

In most cases we are relying on an engineer to pull together the data that proves there really is an issue – not too many sales people have the skills to pin point urgent security issues. It is at this point, after the data has been collected, that the sales person must get involved to find out what was found, and help assess the urgency of the issues. Familiarity with security sometimes causes us to pass over things that are urgent with the idea that, “Everyone has these problems, therefore they aren’t that urgent.” Another issue that arises is, in the thrill of performing these assessments, little attention is paid to the delivery of the findings – this can kill the entire program. The truth is, there is a deal behind every single deliverable. If you lose sight of this, you might find that half of your reports have been delivered, and no one is signing. Your conversion goes from a promise to zero in no time.

I recommend working through these deliverable with a tightly defined process of delivery and assessing the delivery…measure every step to see what happens in the early meetings before handing out all 32 reports. If your findings are not driving action, something is wrong and must be corrected before they’re all out. Remember, the assessment is performed to find urgent issues. If the client has urgent issues, but does not act, the sales person has done them a disservice – they have failed to convince the client of the urgency at hand.