Hit Your Sales Target with 1 Simple (Brilliant) Formula
Most salespeople that I meet, spend their time with prospects who will never help them to hit their target – and at the end of the year, they invariably don’t.
A process that usually begins with the manager who gave them that target, pointing to a geographical area (or a database of contacts – or something similar), and then telling them to just get out there and start selling.
So – because that’s what they’ve been told to do by the boss – that’s what they do.
There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s very noble. Fabulous example of self-motivation and work ethic.
However, the reason they find success so incredibly difficult to pin down, is that they’ve driven themselves directly into the two most fiendish sales prospecting roadblocks in existence.
Busy and Cost.
As you may have have heard me say before, being busy does not necessarily turn itself into results and I use the word ‘cost’ to describe anything that is expendable, most often in sales; Time, Money and Effort.
I’d like to share an example of how you can avoid those two roadblocks, and as you read through, I advise you to start making some notes as to how the headlines translate into your life, your industry and your sales target.
Avoiding Busy and Controlling Cost
My training business, Lucrum House, usually takes up around forty weeks per year of my time.
After national holidays, vacations and other business commitments, forty weeks, or two hundred days, is the amount of time I have available to me to do my work.
The business requires me to be actively earning a crust – delivering training days, keynotes and consultations – for one hundred of those days.
Which obviously only leaves me with one hundred days in the year to focus on my other commitments.
For instance, I have to be present for marketing meetings, time with our chief financial officer, appointments with suppliers. So, I assign sixty days a year to those tasks – which roughly works out to be one and a half days per week.
Adding those sixty ‘office’ days to my one hundred ‘training’ days, only leaves me with forty days left out of my original two hundred.
Those forty days are spent with existing clients and the opportunities we find to work with new contacts.
That’s it, that’s all I have time for because of the cost restraints on my time, and once worked through, it becomes obvious that my time is a far too valuable (and rare) commodity to simple waste on busy.
But here is the final, and most important part of this exercise.
If I align my target (one hundred training days) with the number of customers I actually have time to meet (forty), then it becomes clear that each one of those potential clients would need to have the capacity to require a minimum average of two and a half days each.
Because – if each opportunity only required me to deliver an average of one day’s training – then 40 meetings would turn into 40 days training – and I would only hit 40% of my 100 day target.
And as we’re dealing with reality here – lets be honest – that would be a 100% hit rate, and for one reason or another, no one has a 100% hit rate.
I’m not going to work with all of them, even I’m not that good!
Some of them simply won’t like me, some of them won’t have the available budget – and there will be others that we just can’t help.
That’s just the way life is.
So, let’s be generous and say that half of them decided to work with me and become clients.
That means that, to hit target, I will need to be working with around twenty clients every year – and probably most importantly of all – they must have the capacity, need and requirement for the average of five training days (or equivalent)
Twenty clients, requiring an average of 5 days training each, equals 100 days training – target hit!
It’s something I refer to as the Blue Whale Prospecting Rule:
You Only Open Your Mouth to the Opportunities that Will Feed You
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