Ask the Guru June

Friday 6th Jun 2008

Why do I have good weeks and bad weeks?

How many times do I look back to my earlier years in sales and think "if only I had known the answer to this question - WOW... what a difference it would have made!’"? The answer? Often!

This is often a challenge of our craft - never knowing what the week or month ahead will entail; not knowing if you are going make loads of sales or whether it will be one of those quiet weeks where you spend most of your time reshuffling the office!

If we have a bad week we can tend to blame it on the external variables that we have no control over. And I’ve heard all the excuses: the marketing is not working / it’s quiet because of school holidays / we have had some really bad weather / no one has any money to spend at Christmas / the elections are coming up and people are waiting to see what happens ... and the list goes on.

For many salespeople there is a misconception that it is the responsibility of the business to generate leads (e.g., by consistently running advertising campaigns). So, even if you are the greatest salesperson in the world - a closing machine, even! - unless the company is doing its part by generating leads for us,  we have no control over how successful our week will be. The truth is, though, we can ensure that we have good days every day, regardless of the marketing activities of the company; and it’s actually quite simple.

The number one quality in a salesperson is that of being a ‘self starter’; one who takes control of how many people you see on a daily basis and, as they say, if you see more people you will make more sales!

So, to eliminate the reliance on reactive sales here is a formula that you can use. Firstly, start with the end in mind. In archery, a target is essential, and if we took the target away the archer would have nothing to aim towards; they would be firing arrows in to the distance with no purpose. In sales, a lot of salespeople actually do this - they don’t have a target to aim at, whether that target is the number of phone calls they have to make, or the number of appointments to be generated or the number of sales to be closed. Instead, they fly by the seat of their pants, coming into work each day with no clear direction as to what needs to take place for them to be successful. Therefore, in order for us to have great days every day, the first thing we need to establish is a target; something to aim at on a daily, weekly and monthly basis (e.g., the number of sales to be made).

Once we have this, we then need to work backwards and there are a couple of key performance indicators (KPIs) that we need to know for us to be able to do this effectively. The first being your Close Rate; that is, how many of the people you present to, actually purchase your product or service? The second KPI is your Show Rate, which refers to the number of people who actually show up after being booked into an appointment.

Once we have these two KPIs the rest becomes easy. Firstly take your target (e.g., you need 6 sales per day), then take that number and divide it by your Close Rate and round that figure up. Based on an 80% close rate this would give us 7.5, which we round up to 8. Then, what we must do is take the rounded-up figure (8) and divide it by our Show Rate (80%). Then, as before, you round it up and you are left with the number of appointments you need, in order to be most likely to hit your target. In this instance that would be 10 appointments that we need to have booked, in order to achieve our sales target of 6 closes.

This formula is what I call ‘planning for good days’, and - yes - we plan for good days, every day! This is a strategy that I have used in many different industries and it makes a massive difference in controlling the ups and downs in sales, throughout the course of a month.

So as you can see, taking control of your success and planning for good days every day, means you can go and smash your budgets and targets all from your own self-generation. Therefore, any other sales you make from walk-in traffic, telephone enquires or leads in response to the business’ advertising becomes cream - a little bit extra for you!