Managing Your Sales Numbers

This post is relevant to anyone that uses the phone to follow up leads.

Unless you manage your activity, you won’t know how many calls you need to make a sale. 

The cornerstone of face to face selling is making enough calls.

There was a brilliant book written in the 1930’s by Frank Bettger “How I Raised Myself From Failure To Success In Selling” In it he wrote this;

“You can’t collect the commission until you make the sale,

You can’t make the sale until you write the order,

You can’t write the order, until you have an interview

You can’t have an interview until you make a call.”

Frank was making cold calls, there's nothing wrong with cold calling apart from many people don't like doing it. There are plenty of ways of generating leads without cold calling. 

All of the lead generation that I advocate is direct response marketing. Where you are making an offer and asking for people to 'put their hand up' to show you they are interested. What that means is; they fill in the coupon, or go to the website, call the special number etc.

If people have given you their number and expressed an interest, you've got a legitimate reason to call, particularly if you have made it clear that someone will be calling them.

To achieve a certain level of volume in sales you need to create enough activity to hit your target. Kind of obvious that one, but why not take a look at yourself and ask yourself  the question. Am I doing enough to hit my  sales target?

Selling is a process which tends to follow a sequence, a typical sequence could be:

1. Sales Letter
2. Letter Follow Up Introduction Call
3. Presentation
4. Proposal
5. Order
6. Sale (The first invoice)

Consider your own sequence and determine how many letters, emails etc, are required to  and  to hit your annual target?’

Your answer will depend on the number of letters, emails, and follow up phone calls required to get an appointment and the number of appointments that turn into sales.

           

You could be getting plenty of appointments, but not enough sales. This would indicate that the improvement area is somewhere in the presentation and proposal stages.

  

The point is by monitoring your numbers, it tells you where you are successful and where you may need to improve an aspect of the process or your technique. Its the early warning system of a sales slump!

Take Care

Regards Mark 




Integrated Marketing  Copyright Mark Wheatley 2010 All Rights Reserved