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.

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Weekly Targets

Once every Friday afternoon, I set aside two hours to draft up my goals and targets for the following week.
For me I find it easier to run my week from Saturday to Friday, so that my end of week is at my Friday Review meeting with myself. More on this later.
I first look at all my monthly COMBINED goals and I write down where I want to be in each of them by the following Friday. This is a really good way of chunking down those large goals.

Next, I fill in my regular weekly targets; these are targets that I repeat every week and never change. For example, I will always ensure I ring 100 cold call customers every working week.
Then I glance down my open projects list (see later) and write down what actions I need to do the following week to move the projects forward to completion.
Finally, I add anything else that I feel needs to be achieved by the following week.
Print off your weekly goals for a section in your Success Manual.

Daily Goals

Every evening when I am winding up my working day, I will perform a Daily Review. I will talk more about this in the Scheduling section.
With goal setting, the daily review is essential to my success. It gives me that day-to-day contact with my future vision, so that I am constantly being pulled towards my destiny.
Although I have my calendar in Google calendar, which is synced across all my devices, for my daily review I have reverted back to paper. For me it just seems to ground me more in the present.
I will look at my weekly goals and targets; For each one I will write out an action that can move me towards that weekly goal.
Then I will glance down my Single Actions List (Non-project related items) and write down any that I feel can easily be fitted in or have become due.

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