Many business owners focus on big, sweeping changes to improve their bottom line, but the truth is that small, incremental improvements at every step of the customer journey can lead to massive gains in revenue. Even a 5% increase in key areas like booking rate, conversion rate, and average ticket size can compound and create exponential growth. The concept is simple, but its impact can be profound. Let’s break it down.
The Power of a 5% Increase
To understand how this works, let’s look at a service business that starts with the following metrics:
- Booking Rate: 50%
- Tech Conversion Rate: 50%
- Average Ticket Size: $1,500
For this hypothetical company, we assume they generate around 500 leads per month, leading to:
- Jobs Booked: 250 jobs per month (500 leads × 50% booking rate)
- Jobs Sold: 125 jobs per month (250 booked jobs × 50% conversion rate)
- Monthly Revenue: $187,500 (125 jobs sold × $1,500 average ticket)
Now, let’s explore how a modest 5% improvement at each stage would affect these figures.
Step 1: Boosting Your Booking Rate by 5%
Your booking rate is a crucial point in the customer journey, representing how many leads your customer service representatives (CSRs) can convert into actual appointments or jobs. A booking rate increase from 50% to 55% would lead to:
- 275 Jobs Booked (an additional 25 jobs per month)
This single improvement alone shows how much opportunity is left on the table with lower booking rates. Increasing it slightly has an immediate impact, without additional leads or marketing costs.
Step 2: Improving Conversion by 5%
Next, let’s focus on the tech conversion rate—the percentage of jobs booked that your technicians can successfully close into sold jobs. Going from a 50% to a 55% conversion rate would yield:
- 152 Jobs Sold (up from 125 jobs, but including the additional 25 booked jobs, this results in 152 total jobs sold)
Step 3: Increasing Your Average Ticket Size by 5%
Finally, let’s look at increasing the average ticket size (the amount of revenue generated per job). A 5% increase, from $1,500 to $1,575, might seem minor, but when multiplied across many jobs, the impact is significant. Based on the new number of 152 jobs sold, this increase would boost monthly revenue from:
- $187,500 to $196,875 on the original 125 jobs
- $239,400 with the added jobs and higher ticket size.
The Compounding Effect
With these 5% improvements across the customer journey, the monthly revenue jumps from $187,500 to $239,400. Annually, that’s an increase from $2.25 million to $2.87 million—without adding any additional staff, leads, or significant changes to your operations.
This approach doesn’t require massive investment or a complete overhaul of your marketing strategy. Instead, it focuses on optimizing the processes you already have in place. It’s about leveraging the opportunities hidden within the details.
Key Takeaways:
- Booking Rate: Small improvements in how your CSRs handle leads can significantly boost the number of jobs booked.
- Tech Conversion Rate: Increasing your technicians’ ability to close jobs adds even more value, capitalizing on the additional leads already booked.
- Average Ticket: Small upsells or service enhancements can add to the bottom line without requiring more leads or jobs.
Why Aren’t More Businesses Talking About This?
Many businesses focus heavily on driving more leads, but there’s untapped potential in optimizing the customer journey. Small improvements across the board have a compounding effect, generating more revenue from the same pool of leads and jobs.
This method is low-risk, high-reward: no need for extra staff, no extra marketing spend, just a focus on making existing processes more efficient. It’s time to start talking about the details that drive these impressive results.