You're ready to promote, you have a product or service your target market will love, staff in place and a website to get more leads… but do you really know what your prospects experience when they reach out to you?

If prospects have an unpleasant experience, you may be wasting your hard-earned time and money. Before promoting, there's one way to find out if your sale process is up to par: blind shop your own company.

This will give you loads of insight on how someone perceives your business, your employees and will determine if your staff is ready to handle the new leads coming in.

How do you blind shop? It's really simple… appoint a "mystery shopper" to be interested in buying your product or service (and they eventually do buy it). This person will go through all the avenues any actual lead could experience and rate each process.

Here are a few key points you need to successfully blind shop!

1. Importance of a Good Receptionist.

Many times, your front desk staff acts as a first impression for your company – but so many companies overlook this! When your "mystery shopper" calls in, find out: how many rings did it take for a person to answer? Did he or she have an upbeat, friendly tone? Was he or she helpful in providing the info needed? Did he or she ask how they heard about your company and get your contact info?

On the other side, do you send your prospects to voicemail? How does that make you feel when you call a business and can't speak to a person? It's usually frustrating. This is your chance to convince prospects to continue with their interest in your company — and a recorded message won't help you here.

2. Making Your Website Essential.

When someone comes to your website, what do they see? Will a person know exactly where to go and what to do? Is it clear what your product is, how to buy it or at least how to obtain more info about it? If you are unsure about these questions, that's why you are blind shopping. The mystery shopper will tell you!

It's important that you tell the visitor where to go. For example, have a button that says, "Want an instant quote?" where the prospect can give you their contact info in a fill-in form and ask any questions too – it's easy and allows you to provide and capture detailed information.

Other points to consider…

Are your website colors appealing?

Is the page easy to read or cluttered?

Do the images complement the topic or distract from it?

3. Do You Have a Follow Up Plan?

What if your mystery shopper doesn't buy for 2 weeks? Do you have a fail-safe system in place to stay in front of a lead that you already reached once but didn't close? It's an important part of the selling process and could make or break your sale. An easy and affordable way to stay in touch is through email marketing or by sending a weekly or monthly newsletter. Constant communication develops a trusted relationship and reminds leads that you're still here and ready to help them with your product or service.

Once your mystery shopper tallies the results (the ratings and comments of each part of the sales process), analyze and apply the changes. Remember, the first step to dominating your competition is to find out if what you're currently doing is working! Are you better? If you don't know, you need to find out and that's what blind shopping helps you accomplish.

So why just stop at your business? Next task: blind shop your competitors!

We use what we call our "Competition Checklist" to investigate what our competition is doing and determine how we can improve based on the results.

Wondering how to check out your competition? Download our FREE "Competition Checklist" as a guide! We have a sample "Competition Checklist" at our website.