Small Sign Sales Improvements Have Outsized Effects

IN OUR NEXT AREA of focus for my series on managing sales, I want to show you a way to know exactly what is happening in your salesperson’s efforts.

As a new business owner, I did 100% of my own sales. I was highly driven. When I started to try to hire salespeople, I was quickly frustrated by their lack of drive, their lack of confidence, and it felt like a giant waste of money! Why couldn’t they just do what I was doing?

It was years before I figured out that it was my job to help the salesperson diagnose what was going wrong with their efforts. Telling them to “quote more” or “close more” just wasn’t working.

I was taught by a great business coach, Rachel Friend of the business coaching company Right Angle Results (Prospect, KY), how to dissect my sales performance to gain a clearer insight into what I could tell my sales team members to focus on!

A sales funnel visually represents the entire sales process. If you look back at what your salespeople generated in the previous month, or as an annual average, you will see where they excel and where they need to build their effort.

Note: I know some of us do not track “prospects” that our salespeople are working. I think this is a massive black hole that deserves putting time and effort into gathering. You might be surprised how many prospects are being burned by lack of tracking, distractions and overload. If you track the information effectively, you might be horrified to find out how many leads (you paid for) are simply ignored or dropped.

Using some generic data as an example, I can show you the power of leveraging this information to understand what needs attention by your salesperson. Once you get used to reviewing this data, you’ll find it tells you about how your team is performing, who might need some attention, and who is doing a great job and deserves even more attention!

I have created a salesperson, “Emily,” and put in some typical results. I have created two “What if?” scenarios. You and they might be surprised to learn that if they move the needle on their sales efforts in different ways by just a small amount — as little as 5 or 10 percent, they will see a huge increase in resulting order amounts.

Here is what you see shown. “Emily” has shown on the left in these charts an actual month she had where she had only $6,945 orders completed.

In Scenario 1 we plugged in increases of just 5% in all areas — increases in leads generated, average pricing, her winning business. She jumped from $6,954 in sales to $11,049. Getting a 5% improvement in performance is not a lot to ask of most motivated sales professionals. Maybe they can’t improve all areas at once, but measuring and sharing performance will generate focus and results.

In Scenario 2 we put in a big jump in prospects, up 25%, because that is simply the easiest thing to control. Talk to more customers, do more networking, generate leads by calling old customers, and boom, you have a 25% increase. In addition, we moved to 10% in all areas. You can see the month then went from $6,954 to $16,692!

Teach your sales team that incremental improvements in key areas of their focus will create cascading and monumental changes! You will find great vision and clarity by looking at this data regularly.

Download an Excel file of the figures you see below at signsofthetimes.com/032507.