Selling Skills Training | Sales Activities and Sales Effectiveness
It makes no difference if you are selling commercial aircraft at $100 million each or selling packets of washing powder, the law of raw numbers is fundamental to sales success. In simple terms you need to give yourself every chance of winning by getting yourself on the starting grid for as many races as possible.
Activity and effectiveness. Essentially, playing the “numbers games” means paying attention to these two pillars of sales success. Activity is the amount of work you put in, effectiveness is the skill with which you execute your plans.
If you work hard and call up a thousand people every month. But have no idea who you are calling or how to speak to them, you’re likely to fail. Equally, you might be the best telephone seller in the world, but if you only speak to two or three people every week, you will also fail. So selling, particularly generating new business, is not just a “war of attrition”, it is also a war to be fought using intelligence and skill.
The funnel. Think about your sales pipeline as a huge funnel. The top of the funnel is very wide, and you can fill it with a great many new suspects. As you move each opportunity through the selling cycle, the numbers of opportunities normally become fewer. At each stage, opportunities will fall away, for all sorts of reasons, some of which will be beyond your control. You can do the mathematics and work out what your conversion rate is for each stage of the selling cycle. Your conversion rate is affected by your abilities at each stage – your effectiveness.
For example you might find you are an absolute genius at making new appointments with prospects over the telephone. But for some reason, a lot of these meetings never seem to turn into real opportunities. Your conversion rate of the meeting stage needs some attention! In this way, analyzing your raw numbers and your conversion rates will help you to spot bottlenecks in your sales pipeline.
“Create a deep pipeline with lots of new opportunities at the top of the funnel”.
