Activity breeds activity

Pulling your hair out only creates a bad hair day!
You've tried everything you can think of - called your best clients, dressed better - maybe you even bathed today!  However, you are not getting the results you desire.

Many salespeople, no matter how grounded or religious in other areas of their life, get very superstitious when it comes to sales. 

I often ask a sales professional "Why do you have a salt shaker on your desk, and your trophies are all turned backwards?"  The response, with all the confidence and shock in the world, "Well, I have a strong appointment today, and I don't want to jinx it."  Really?  Don't you hope your surgeon has more confidence in her ability the next time you need a procedure??

Here's the cold, hard, facts.  Sales is a blend of art and science, of  "try" and "do" work, as one of my old bosses used to say.  On the art side, it is an art to read buying signals, to know when to shut up, to know when a buyer is bluffing.  The science side is much, much larger.  Results can be predictable and creatable, if you are willing to put the discipline in to your normal regimen.   Manage all of the "Do" work you can, minimizing the impact of the "try" work.

Here's a simple example:

  Phone calls O/B emails Appointments Sales
Month 1 150 400 30 4
         
Month 2 200 500 30 2


In month one, a sales professional made 150 phone calls, 400 outbound emails, had 30 face to face appointments yielding 4 sales.  The sales pro might feel pretty good that they converted over 13% of their face to face appointments.  The following month he stepped up his activities, but yielded only 2 sales.  Why was he half as effective? 

This can be a maddening game to play - but part of the answer in solving his dilemma is understanding his capacity - in the normal course of business, how many phone calls, O/B emails and appointments is he capable of?  Don't measure yourself just on the results - utilize other metrics, and judge yourself accordingly.  With this salesperson, I would recommend he work backwards, first identifying how many appointments he can reasonably handle during a month (i.e. 5 workdays, 2-3 appointments a day, 4.3 weeks a month = approximately 50 appointments a month). 

Next, I would have him solve what other activities may yield those 50 appointments, starting with analyzing where the 7 appointments that yielded sales came from - and creating more of those.  Yes, the market is a factor, competitors, etcetera, but we have an increased opportunity to win when we begin with what we know we can control!

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