Sales & Sales Management Brew

It is hard, almost impossible, to measure sales success unless you have something to measure with. I like to cook.  Most of the time I ignore the required measurements for the ingredients I'm using if it is a recipe that I've prepared before.  But, if it is a new dish, then I follow the recipe 'almost' to the letter.  It helps me improve my probability of success.  Selling functions the same way.  If you want to improve your probability of your sales success, then you have to have a recipe, a formula so to speak, and you must measure what the formula requires.  We call these success metrics.

In a recent newsletter about developing sales plans, I discussed success in sales and the importance of a 'sales business plan'.  My last post referencing the newsletter, Sales Success Practices Start With the End in Mind, discussed the importance of having a clear vision or goal of where you want your practice to be in a specific time horizon.  If you think of this goal as an ultimate destination, you would want to establish 'mile markers' or check points along the way to measure your progress towards your goal.  These measures / metrics help you do two things:  1) establish how far you've come and 2) predict how far you have to go and how long it will take you to get there.  It is the 2nd point that often gets WAY overlooked and ignored and it is what we have to discuss today. 

When establishing your goals, you need to identify what Verne Harnish calls 'smart numbers'. 

These are the numbers that, in selling, would help you predict your future sales or financial health.  They could include, but should not be limited to, the following:

• The number of contacts made each day/week/month
• The number of contacts converted to 1st time appointments
• The number of 1st appointments converted to opportunities
• The number of opportunities converted to presentations
• The number of presentations converted to closed sales
• The average size sale
• The length of your sales cycle

Yes, this resembles having call sheets.  I don't care and neither should you as a sales professional. I've known highly successful sales people that can retrieve at any given moment their entire history of sales activity.  This information is what helps predict and validate their success.  It gives them the road map to their success.  It helps them determine if they are on course and, when they are off course, it helps them figure out what they have to change.

Operating a sales business without metrics is akin to taking a cross country drive without a roadmap or signs to guide you.  Yes, you may get there, and yes, you might see some wonderful country along the way.  If your objective is to 'get there'effectively and quickly, whereever 'there' is, then traveling with a map (today we use GPS) is the best way to accomplish that objective.