When I ask salespeople and business owners what their ratios and conversion rates are, few know. They cannot answer simple questions like…
How many calls do you need to make to get a meeting? How many mail shots do you need to send to get your quota of inbound leads? How many meetings do you need to chair to get a qualified opportunity? What percentage of qualified opportunities will result in a deal? What is your average deal size?
You get the idea.
Only by knowing these ratios and statistics can you know how you are doing. Only by knowing these ratios can you know when they are improving (or deteriorating). Only by knowing these ratios can you reliably forecast the amount of activity (and what activity) you need to do to achieve your targets, your ambitions and your goals.
To improve your sales skills you need a benchmark of how effective they currently are. This benchmark is your ratios.
Many salespeople that I have worked with resent being asked to log and track their ratios feeling that this is “micro-management” and that they should be just left to get on with things…
They are partly right. It shouldn’t be me encouraging them to keep these statistics – they should want to keep them. They should be tracking, studying and leveraging these figures and statistics themselves to ensure that they are on track for the sales results that they crave. They should know them inside out.
Taken from Real World Sales Skills.
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