Targets

From the Selling Strategy stage, you will have your sales targets to reach. This could be annual, quarter or month. In some cases, it may be week or day. Your target could be financial ie Net Sales or Gross Revenue. It could be numbers of sales. The important first stage of achieving your target is to translate it into daily activities.

Daily Prospecting Activities

If you are lucky, your company may already have data, which shows, for instance, how many outbound sales calls it will take to make a sale. You can then work backwards from you financial target. For example, say you sell capital equipment and your annual target is £900,000 in sales. Your company’s data shows that the average sale is £30,000 in value. Then taking an average of your colleagues, it takes three proposal submissions to produce one sale. It takes five site surveys/ needs analysis visits to be able to provide three proposals. For each site survey it takes you 6 conversations, so to get five site surveys you will need to speak to 30 decision makers and pitch your offer (more on that later). To reach a decision maker on the telephone takes you six attempts due to them being in meetings, off ill, on holiday etc. From this data, you can then work out how many outbound sales calls, per day, it will take you to hit your target. In our example to make your target of £900,000 this year, you will need to make an average of 30 sales this year. (£900,000/£30,000=25). To get 30 sales this year, it will take 90 proposals, 150 site surveys, 900 telephone conversations with decision makers and therefore 5,400 outbound sales calls. Let’s now say that you will work 47 weeks this year. With Bank Holidays, training courses, etc. it will be more like 45 weeks. You will therefore need to make 120 outbound sales calls per week and therefore 24 per day. Let’s round it up, so your magic number – 25 calls per day.

Keeping Records

If you are not so lucky as to belong to a business which already has this prospecting data, you should make it your responsibility to start to record it. Here is a list of the data you should start to log:
Telephone prospect calls made.
Actual telephone contacts made with decision maker.
First appointments made.
Quotations/ proposals submitted.
Sales closed number.
Sales closed value.
You can log all this data physically on paper or in an excel file, but it could get quite messy and be difficult to analyse. This is why I recommend you consider using a CRM system or Customer Relationship Management tool. I can heartily recommend Insightly. In the beginning, selling is very much a numbers game, but if you record your performance across every area, you can actually measure the improvement in your skills. Selling then becomes more of an art.