You then determine how many sales presentations you will have to make, based on your current experience and skill level, to achieve that number of sales. From there, you work back to determine how many calls you will have to make to find that number of qualified prospects. You then determine how many prospecting calls you will have to make each day in order to get a certain number of presentations and follow-ups, which will lead to the number of sales you desire and the achievement of your income goal.
If you determine that you have to make twenty phone calls in order to get five appointments, and you need five appointments in order to get one sale, 311
Time Power
you now have a specific target to aim at. You have a specific activity goal that you can work on each day. Every morning, you begin work and focus o making a specific number of calls. You discipline yourself to do the things you need to do, to achieve the goals that you have set for yourself.
Get Better At What You Do
Once you have determined your sales goals, and worked out an activity schedule for each day, you immediately go to work on yourself to upgrade your skills in your key result areas.
One of the best uses of your time is to get better in the most important things you do. Your goal is to upgrade your skills so that you achieve more and better results in a shorter period of time.
For example, if the number of appointments you make is determined by how effective you are on the telephone, you should decide, right now, to become an expert at telephone prospecting. If your success is determined by how effectively you present your product, then practice and become an expert at presentation skills. If your success is determined by how well you handle objections, or close the sale then you should make yourself an expert in each of these areas.
Improve Your Ratios
When you begin, you may make only one sale for every twenty people you speak to. As you improve your sales skills, your ratio will get better and 312
Time Power
better. Soon, you will be making one sale for every fifteen people that you speak to, and then one sale for every ten people, and so on.
Some professional sales people, by continually practicing and upgrading their skills, have reduced their call-to-sale ratio to as low as 5 to 1, and even 3 to 1. Just think what a difference it would make in your income if you could sell to every third person you spoke to!
Analyze Your Current Skill Level
There are seven key result areas in selling. On a scale from one to ten, you must be at a seven or better in each of these areas if you want to realize your full potential as a sales professional. They are the following:
#1: Prospecting: getting appointments with people what can and will buy in a reasonable period of time;
#2: Establishing trust and rapport; asking questions, listening, and establishing a bond of trust and friendliness that is essential to making any sale;
#3: Identifying needs: asking questions to determine exactly what it is that the customer wants and needs from you, and how you can serve him best;
#4: Presenting solutions: showing the prospect that your product or service, all things considered, is the ideal choice for him or her at this time;
#5: Answering objections: resolving any questions or concerns that the customer may have about your product or service;
#6: Closing the sale: asking the prospect to take action on your offer; 313
Time Power
#7: Getting resales and referrals: creating “customers for life,” who buy from you again and recommend you to their friends and colleagues.
Give yourself a grade on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the lowest and 10
being the highest, in each of these seven key result areas.
Start With Your Weakest Key Skill
Here is a discovery; your weakest key result area sets the height of your sales and your earnings. You may be excellent at six out of the seven of these key result areas, but your weakness in the seventh area will determine how much you sell and earn overall.
The good news is that all sales skills are learnable. You can learn any skill you need to achieve any goal you have set for yourself. The most rapid improvement in your sales results will come from your identifying your weakest skill and working exclusively in that area until you have mastered it.
Ask yourself this question, “What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest impact on my sales and my income?”
Whatever your answer is to that question, write down the development of that skill as a goal, make a plan, organize your plan by priority, and work on getting better in that area every single day. Read every morning on the subject. Listen to audio programs in your car. Attend seminars and workshops to learn how to master that key skill. This decision can have 314
Time Power
more of an affect on your income, and faster, than anything else you could do.
Plan Your Work in Advance
Once you have determined your sales, income and activity goals clearly, you can then plan your year, your month, your week, and especially every day in advance. Plan your upcoming week on the weekend before. Plan your upcoming day the evening before. Always work from a written plan of action.
Many top sales people will take one or two hours on either a Saturday or a Sunday to plan the coming week. Some of them will plan their coming week on the previous Friday. The very act of planning gives you a tremendous sense of control over yourself and your work. It gives you a feeling of personal power. Prior planning increases your self-confidence and raises your self-esteem. And every minute in planning saves you ten minutes in execution, so you’ll get much more done than someone that does not plan at all.
The Acid Test of Prospecting
A good measure of how well you are doing in prospecting is to determine how far in advance you are booked for sales appointments and presentations.
A good salesperson usually has their appointments for the following week all planned out by Friday of the previous week. If you ask where he or she is 315
Time Power
going to be the next week, he can tell you within one hour where he will be each day, from Monday to Friday.
Poor sales people have no idea where they will be in the coming week. They have few appointments and no plans. Everyday is a new adventure for them.
They don’t know how it is going to turn out. As a result, they work less than 90 minutes a day, and spend most of their time around the office or having lunch or coffee with their co-workers.
From now on, resolve to plan every day the day before, preferably at the end of the day, or in the evening. Make out a list of everything that you have to do the following day, and organize the list by time and priority before you turn out the lights.
Set a goal to structure your day with appointments 30 to 60 minutes apart.
The law of forced efficiency says that, if you put tight time constraints on yourself for each appointment, you will cover everything of importance in the sales call within the time allotted.
Plan Your Calls Geographically
One of the most important time management techniques for sales people is to group your calls in a specific geographic area. This enables you to reduce travel time, and to increase the number of calls that you can make during the day. Keep reminding yourself that you have nothing to sell but your time, face to face with prospects and customers, and how you use your time determines your income.
316
Time Power
Don’t make the mistake of making your first appointment in the north end of town, and your second appointment at the south end, and then spending half your day driving in between. Many poor sales people organize their time this way. They are somehow able to convince themselves that they are actually working when they are traveling great distances between appointments.
Close the Sale
One of the best time management techniques is to close the sale after the presentation so that you do not have to go back over and over. Give the prospect an opportunity to buy at the end of every sales conversation. Ask for the order, one way or another. Fully 50% of all sales calls end without the salesperson asking for the order once.
One of the very worst uses of time is for you to go through the laborious process of prospecting, getting appointments, making presentations, answering objections, and then not closing the sale. For you to lose the sale because you cannot or will not ask a closing question wipes out all of the time you have invested up to now.