Your money is hiding in your sales data
We've all heard the old adage "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". this is especially true for salesmen. Let's talk about some basic data analysis and application that will give you greater control of your results and help you make a lot more money.
Selling over the phone usually means a very high volume of sales calls and presentations. As with any sales job, there is a lot of rejection. The majority of sales presentation won't end in a sale, which is why it is so important to know your close rate. Your close rate is the percentage of full presentations that you give that do result in a completed sale. If you're selling for a corporation, chances are that data is being tracked for you, and if it hasn't been provided to you already, you can likely access it just by asking your managers. If you're working for yourself selling a product or service over the phone, you can still easily determine your close rate in your own. Simply track your full presentations on a tally sheet. A full presentation means a call which contains all parts of the sales process including asking for the sale at the end. I recommend tracking 100 presentations to get an accurate picture of what is really going on. Each time you make a full presentation, make a tally mark. Each time a presentation results in an actual sale, circle the tally mark. When you reach 100, you'll have your close rate. For example, if you have made your 100 presentations and you have 10 circled tallies, your close rate is 10%. Easy peasy!
Next, you must have a clearly defined goal. You must know how much volume you want to sell in a given sales cycle. Your cycle can be a week, a month or a year, and it is a good idea to check in on your data weekly, monthly and yearly, but for now let's just use a monthly sales cycle as our example. In a given month, set a target for how much volume you want to sell, let's use $200,000 as our example. Now, determine how many actual sales you have in that month, subtracting out any days off, holidays, etc. Let's sale we have 20 actual sales days in our sales month. Now, the math is simple: $200,000 in sales volume / 20 sales days = $10,000/ day needed in order to reach that target. You now have your minimum daily sales target.
Now, I do realize that in reality, not every day is the same, of course it isn't. Some days you will sell vastly more than your minimum daily sales target. some days you might not sell at all., and that really is OK! The wonderful thing about the data is that in the end, it will ALWAYS true up. So long as you make a enough presentations to reach your goal given your typical close rate, by the end of the month, you will land near your target.
If you're looking for ways to improve your close rate, or want to learn about what other metrics you should be tracking and how to make the most of your sales data to put more money in your pock, consider scheduling your 1:1 coaching session today, or better yet, take advantage of a completely FREE introductory session to see if I am the right coaching fit for you. Now let's go make some fat stacks!
~Kat Jack
