30 to 300: Easy way we increased close rates for our product by 34%

Some close friends and business associates I have met over the years have asked me how we were able to grow Citrix ShareFile from 30 to 300 sales reps in just 4 years to become the file sharing platform to beat. I want to share from my experience the lessons I learned working with Jesse Lipson (ShareFile’s founder) as well as Ed Cheely (my friend and former VP of sales) about running a SaaS business, scaling a sales driven organization, and leadership. A mentor of mine once said, “you don’t truly own something until you can give it away.” So please feel free to share with anyone who might think it relevant.

This post is a quick tip to increase your close rates by 34% by turning on your web cam during online meetings

A/B testing and metric driven decisions are a part of our fabric at ShareFile. There is no better argument equalizer than to say “stop arguing and test it…” You want a leadership team that doesn’t strangle each other when making decisions? Make this a part of your ethos.

We give product demonstrations of ShareFile over virtual meetings (like GoToMeeting). At the end of the call our objective is to make the sale before getting off the phone. When GoToMeeting came out with a new feature called “HD Faces” our game changed. People could now actually see that we were real human beings that could feel feels. But was that true? Did it matter tactically if we turned on our cameras while doing the demonstration? Example:

We then rigged our CRM to flash a message to each person when they launched a demonstration to say either: “Turn on your Camera” or “Don’t Turn on your Camera” (so we had a true internal control). At the end, we analyzed the data and what we found was incredible: On average, we had a 34% increase in Close Rates (close rates being the % of deals that buy once having shown up to the meeting).

We did have a few people whose close rates dipped…we later found they were awkwardly staring into the camera…so we implemented trainings to help the webcam challenged.

You’ll get some initial push back: “I didn’t do my makeup today” or “I’m not comfortable with it yet”, and by far, driving compliance is the hardest part of rolling this out…I still can’t figure out why certain people don’t want to close more sales…maybe a rant for another time. One guy had a lot of fun with it and would say “tell me when you see Brad Pitt staring back at you”…he was clearly not Brad Pitt.

A sales manager at Zenefits asked me: “do you get the prospect to turn on their camera?” The answer is: we try. “Hey I’m going to turn on my camera, if you have one, would you mind turning on yours too?” One of my reps had their customer do this and found that the customer was spinning their credit card in their fingers…a good indication of how the meeting was going.

This is a fantastic way to build rapport and to be in charge of the sale: you can tell if they’re paying attention or distracted, you can read their face if they don’t understand something or are delighted by something and can dig in.

Summary: Have your reps turn on their web cams and you will find your close rates and efficiency increases.

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