Enemies of Your Sales

The buyer is always neutral. If you are not in control of the sale, and the buyer is neutral, then someone else is in control, and it is usually the competition. (And that competition could be an alternate choice of action, such as to do nothing, spend the money elsewhere, or delay the process, or a competitor. Anything that prevents you from getting an order is competition.)

Remember:

There are several sales axioms that require constant repetition; to ignore them does a disservice to your employer, your family, and your wallet. Among the most important of these is that salespeople have enemies.

Enemies

• The first enemy is time. There are only so many hours in a day. You can only accomplish so much. To fight this enemy, you have to use your time wisely.
• The second enemy is the status quo. It’s difficult to get people to change the way they do things—and that goes for salespeople, too.
• The third enemy is impatience, a desire to clinch a sale before the prospect is ready.

Battling these enemies begins when prospecting for new clients. Most people think of sales as a numbers game. That is, the more calls you make, the greater the likelihood you get a contract signed. To a certain extent this is true. The reality is that in almost any country in the world, if you simply stand on a corner with your hand out, someone will put money in it. If you stand on the corner longer, more people will see you, so more will likely put money into your hand. But how many hours can you put in? At what point does it become the law of diminishing returns? If you are already working a full day, does it pay to stand on that corner three or four hours more when all your prospects have gone to sleep?

When it comes to begging, the numbers game alone doesn’t cut it. Sales is no different. In a typical marketplace, a salesperson will get one third of the business simply by showing up (visibility). The competition gets one third. And there’s that one third that is up for grabs.



You don’t want to be the person on the corner with your hand out. So if making more cold calls won’t improve your sales figures, what will? The answer is ratios—that is, the number of calls you make to the number of sales you close. For example.

Every day you sell you call fifteen prospects—that is, fifteen people you have never called before. Usually you can get through to seven and set up one new appointment. For every eight appointments, you close one sale. So the ratio for appointments is fifteen to one. The ratio for closing a sale is eight to one.

There are several ways you can improve the ratios. The most common approach is to play the numbers game; that is, you can cold-call more than fifteen people a day, or you can work another day of the week. Of course, the reality is that you haven’t just been goofing off. There isn’t any extra time in the day (or the week) for you to devote more time to prospecting.

Patience Is a Virtue

So if just making more calls isn’t a practical solution, what is? The answer is in improving other aspects of the ratio. It is not difficult. But my experience is that most salespeople don’t understand ratios. Salespeople? Most sales managers don’t understand ratios.

What ratios do is force you to look at what is the weakest part of your process. Remember, sales is a process. Do you only get through to three prospects out of every fifteen you call? Then concentrate on improving that ratio. Do you only close one sale for every fifteen prospects you visit? Then work on improving that aspect of your game.

It’s easy for to say that. But there are very simple concrete steps every salesperson can take to get through to more people, to close sales, to be more efficient. In short, to make better use of their time.

Here are just a couple examples of how ratios can be improved. There are two main objectives in cold calling. The first is to get through to the right person. The second is to get an appointment. If you don’t know the name of the person, ask for the person’s title. For example, if you’re selling insurance, ask for the risk manager. If you sell office supplies, ask for the office manager. If you don’t get through, that is if you’re connected to a secretary or voice mail, leave the right kind of message. It should be something that provokes a return call:

“Hi, this is Steve Schiffman, and I’m calling about the XYZ Corporation.” (XYZ is a customer of yours and also one of your prospect’s competitors.) Your message doesn’t really have to mean anything specific. It’s just something to get the conversation started.

If they get through, or when (not if) the prospect responds to their message, most people ramble on or try to sell instead of getting to the point of the call: to get an appointment. The idea is to start a conversation.!

Ratio

Another way to improve your ratio is to select potential prospects better. Prioritize those you call on first and concentrate on the most. By that, I mean if someone uses a product similar to yours and you can provide some improvement, that potential is great.

If someone is located a three-hour drive away, you have to weigh just how much value there is in a sales call that essentially takes an entire day.

Some Thoughts…

Your sales volume can very likely improve if you improve your technique. You don’t have to be a great or even motivated salesperson to get appointments. It’s just a matter of technique to:

• Get to the right person.
• Leave the right message.
• Get an appointment.

Everyone does something well, and whatever it is—a sports activity, acting, managing—we tend to concentrate on it. Who doesn’t want to do something he excels at? And this is true in the sales process also. But sales is a particular area where you have to concentrate on what you are bad at. Is making cold-calls a problem? Work on that technique.