NJA Consulting

“Time lost may never be recovered”. Chaucer.

Professional selling is a numbers game, pure and simple. It’s all about discipline, repetition and dogged, relentless pursuit of the sale. One of the greatest things to overcome is procrastination, we all do it, it happens without you realising and sometimes, will be the key reason you didn’t land that crucial order. A great little test I used to great effect when discussing pipeline activity with a colleague was to concentrate their mind on time as one of the easiest ways to make improvements in performance! Sort this first before you do anything else.

Try it you will always find more time if you know where to look!

In an average year we have a total of 365 days

Take away weekends and we loose 104 days, leaving 261 days. Bank holidays take 8 further days leaving 253 days, then take away your holiday annual allowance of 21 days (this may vary) leaving 232 days. Training will take away some days per annum, lets say 8 leaving you with 224 days, then deduct  4 days per annum for sickness and absence and the inevitable fixed meetings so let’s take another 20 days (unless you work in the energy industry then you need around 60-70 days – joking!), which leaves 200 days.

In terms of selling lets keep this in context, so “selling” includes face to face contact, planning and administration, telephone contacts and related travelling, so your geographical area is crucial, make no mistake keeping tight call patterns is paramount.

The average selling day (assume just 8 hours), what does it look like for you?

Administration %

Telephone/ appointment making %

Travelling % (watch this one as this can seriously erode effective time)

Waiting %

Selling face to face %

Others/ misc %

Let’s assume again for consideration that your success rate in sales is 1-4. For every 4 enquiries or leads you work on, on average, you convert 1.

In those 200 days if you see on average 3 customers a day that will be 600 customers a year, and on a 1-4 conversion means 150 orders. Well done. Now for arguments sake if you squeezed in an extra call a day then your numbers would swell to 800 customers a year and over 200 orders. Make it 5 customers a day that’s 1000 customers a year, that’s 250 orders or an increase of over 65% on your 150.

Now let’s say an average order is £100k you have just increased your revenue and therefore profitability by over 65%, and for what? Just doing a little bit more each day.

Hypothetical – of course it is, but consider the point I am trying to make, once you have taken all the other things out of the equation you actually don’t have too much time to actually sell. Consider also that you are probably an expensive overhead and therefore need to be productive, by managing your effective time correctly gives you increased opportunity to improve your efficiency massively by doing a little bit more each day.

Chances are you are also managed from a distance so don’t get too much 1:1 time with colleagues and bosses, your approach and self discipline on the things that really matter each week are fundamental if you want to kick the competition out of the park, get that bonus and recognition that gets you up the ladder.

If you are in sales and you are responsible for NEW business sales in particular then you should be seeing new clients on a daily basis, the internet has taken away one of the biggest excuses for poor sales performance or gripes – a lack of leads! Of course your business should be supporting you with qualified leads and on a weekly basis but, if your title has business development or sales manager in it you should be developing your own leads and opportunities as a matter of course. Within any business there will always be internal and external avenues for business development so make sure you plug yourself in and exhaust all lines as quickly as you can, i will predict you will fall over some enquiries and these are the low fruit that will assist in you hitting target and filling the slippage and gaps that will naturally occur, good luck and crack on…

Watch out for my next blog on SWOT or SOM…