Many business owners have no idea what their company sales will be next week, month or year. Other than relying on past performance or simply wishful thinking, they under estimate the control they really have over their destiny and ability to achieve their sales goals.
They wish for the best. Work hard. And hope that sales go up or they hit their goals.
They lack an understanding of relational activities. As a result, they don’t have a mechanism for accurately predicting sales performance based on lead generation and conversion behaviors.
Obtaining business is never random. It is always based on some behavior your business is engaged.
Allow me to illustrate.
One of my clients and I worked through their sales process and broke it down into the key definable activities. We began tracking the result of those activities in order to determine the relationship of each activity to sales performance.
Here is what we created.
Number of contact attempts to reach a new prospect. This represents the number of phone dial attempts to reach a prospect. Yes, we want to track the number of dial attempts regardless of the outcome. This is a behavior that can be controlled or orchestrated.
Number of contacts achieved. This represents the number of prospects actually reached on the phone. In this particular case, the success of this area is going to be dependent on the effectiveness of your script or system to get past the gatekeeper to the decision maker.
Number of appointments set. This represents the number of appointments set. The success of the process is going to be dependent on the quality of your script or system to set appointments.
Number of presentations completed. This represents your sales process and the number of actual completed presentations.
Number of sales. Obviously the number of sales made, which will reflect the quality of your sales process.
Average value of sale. Simple formula. Total new sales dollars divided by the number of sales. Example: $50,000/17 sales = $2941.18 per sale average.
None of this information means anything unless you use it properly. When used properly, this information will be invaluable for you to effectively predict and ensure that you are hitting your sales objectives proactively.
First of all, if you understand the relationship between the number of dial attempts to sales you can make adjustments to the number of dials made to ensure you hit your sales goals.
For an example. If this company over the course of a month made 800 dial attempts (approx. 40 per day) and made 17 sales then the dial to sale attempt percentage is a little over 2%. Or looking at it another way, 1 sales is made every 47 dials.
Check this out. Each time someone picks up the phone to dial a prospect, regardless of the outcome, it’s worth $62.58. (Total value per sale ($2941.18) divided by the number of dial attempts (47).
This is exciting information.
It means that if you want to increase your sales, increase your dials. Pick up the phone and dial some more!
Another way this information is helpful is to understand the effectiveness of each step in the process.
I just spoke with a client that is current looking at how to increase the contact attempt to appointment set percentage from 5% – 10%. In this case, it’s not about making more calls, it’s about improving the current system they use to set appointments.
My client is looking at their system for setting appointments. Improve the system improve the results.
When is improves his system, which he will, this process alone has the potential to literally double his company’s sales.
Double his business by improving one system!!!!!
So do you think it’s possible to improve the effectiveness of setting appointments 5%?
Are you pumped up yet? You ought to be because I am showing you the process to dramatically improve your sales.
The key is developing the best system in this case.
Now I understand your business sales process may not look like the example provided.
If your business is retail, you would likely monitor the amount of traffic in your store on a daily basis. In that case, you will have to carefully monitor your lead generation systems and track the sources of how people found you as best as possible.
Either way the point is to become intentional about driving sales in your business. Not just waiting or hoping that you are going to hit your sales goals.
Understanding the relational impact of the activities that lead to your sales will enable you to make strategic and systematic decisions in order to achieve your results.
Here is a list of action items that will help you create an environment where you are almost guaranteed to achieve your sales goals.
1- Set your goal. Pretty obvious but often not done.
2- Have a system in place to monitor and report sales performance frequently. Depending on how aggressive your goals are, you might want daily or weekly reports.
3- Track the activities that lead to sales.
4- Develop your systems for each step in the sales or lead generation cycle.
5- Monitor performance and make adjustments to your system until you are getting the result you want.
You really don’t have to feel like achieving your sales goals is some allusive or mystical process. It’s a cause and effect relationship. There is a relationship between the activities you do to generate sales and your actual results. To the degree you understand and make appropriate adjustments will determine the likelihood of achieving your sales goals.