Some people love the idea of sales and other hate it. Which one are you?

I was talking to one of my clients the other day about sales skills and what he could do to improve his performance and, in turn, the performance of his team. He’s in financial services, but as of late business has been slow. He told me that he couldn’t put all of this done to the state of the economy and he was getting really worried that he wasn’t getting many appointments.  People weren’t returning his phone calls…and the few people he was actually speaking with weren’t interested in meeting with him.

In his next sentence, however, he perked up and stated with great pride that he was a great closer and that his conversion rate of prospect to new client was up around 80%. So what was his problem?

After a bit of discussion he figured it out for himself when he came to the conclusion that he just wasn’t seeing enough, calling enough or communicating with enough people. He’d forgotten that selling isn’t about being a great closer.  Selling is about being a great opener.  It’s about creating opportunities.  It’s about discovering what people want and need, and then giving them the solution to their problem.

Selling is about making the customer’s life better, easier. But when you’re not opening prospect files…creating opportunities…you’ve nothing to close. As an aside, this is one of the great things that Social Media is teaching us every day. It’s about conversations. It’s about being open. It’s about helping.

So, to buck up your number of ‘openings’, ask yourself these questions:

• how many times do you dial the phone each day or send an email or reach out for the sole purpose of scheduling an appointment with a prospective new customer?
• how much time do you spend doing that every day?
• do you block out time in your diary to solely focus on this?
• where are you getting your leads?
• how many times do you follow up with a person before you decide they aren’t a prospect and you move on?
• how many people are you calling from your database that you’ve called on five, ten, fifteen times but have never bought from you
• what are your annual sales goals…quarterly goals….monthly goals…weekly goals   daily goals, etc.?
• what level of daily activity (appointments, calls, emails, meetings, presentations, blog posts) must you generate to achieve these goals?

The key here is that it doesn’t need to be exact numbers but you need numbers in order to measure your progress. Pick some and see how you do.

Thanks to Monica’s Dad for the photo