HTA CERTIFIED INTEGRATOR ELECTRONIC CONCEPTS OPERATIONS | Sales Lose the Leads Mentality & Focus on Closing Understand why close percentage is the most important metric in determining your company's success, and how you can work on increasing it. By Eric Thies Among sales myths to overcome is that while clients care about price, it is not everything when it comes to earning their business for premium solutions. I LOVE TO TALK BUSINESS with my buddies in the industry. I am part of The Guild, Azione and the Home Technology Association (HTA Certified) so I am fortunate to be friends with a lot of successful integrators that are always making me smarter. Being a curious person (some would say nosy) doesn't hurt either. I am typically not afraid to ask a lot of questions and skip right past the small talk. One of the stats I like to discuss is the close percentage. I am curious as to how many proposals my peers need to generate to get a closed sale. I can say that the bigger the ego of the person I am talking to equates to a response that has a higher number. The big ego guys always tell me they have a " 90% " close ratio - meaning if they create 10 proposals, nine of them turn into sales. The " cup half empty " guys typically say " 20%, " which is also probably not true. I am not saying my pals are lying, but I think they are not properly tracking this statistic. And they should be! Now if I interviewed 100 integrators and asked, " What is more important - increasing your incoming leads or increasing your closing percentage? " I bet 99 would respond " increas- 52 | CE Pro May 2021 cepro.com C2105 pp52-55 HTA Sales.indd 52 4/6/21 10:46 AMhttp://www.cepro.com