How much action do you take daily towards your sales goals? How do you ensure that your sales pipeline is overflowing with abundant opportunities? What are the three things you should do every day without fail if you want to succeed in sales?
We’ll explore these questions and more in the following article, if you’re in Sales (and we all are) do yourself a favour and read on.
Did you know that it takes on average 8 attempts to reach a lead, that means we need to be taking more action, way more action if we want our business to hit record numbers.
Ask yourself this question: Would you cold call a potential lead 8 times if you didn’t get a response on the first, second or even third attempt? At what point would you give up?
What I am getting at here is that as a nation of sales people, we typically don’t take the required amount of action to even be in the running for the sale. In a nutshell we aren’t persistent enough and that’s what leads us to have poor sales figures, not the market, not the product, not the excuses we create to make ourselves feel better.
Did you know that 30–55% of all sales go to the person that responds to the client first? This tells us that on top of taking daily action to follow up leads, as effective sales people we also need to be responsive and deliver quality to our clients, every time!
STRUCTURE YOUR DAY FOR SALES MASTERY
The best sales people know how to balance their priorities throughout the course of the day. I am a raving mad fan of New York’s #1 real estate broker, Ryan Serhant, his FKD 3 Hats method for organising your day for sales process mastery is a recipe for success.
It operates on the principle that your day should be split into 3 sections.
CEO Hat (Finder)
Between the hours of 8am-10am you need to think like a CEO, in this respect you are hunting for new business, driving your ship forwards and developing your pipeline. Ryan calls this the Finder Hat.
CFO Hat (Keeper)
At 12pm-2pm you switch hats and transform into the CFO of your business, here your task is to focus solely on lead generation activities like marketing, planning events and mail outs, this hat is called the Keeper.
Sales Hat (Doer)
Between the hours of 2pm-4pm you transform yet again into the COO of the business by wearing your Doer Hat. This is where you are bringing everything together and putting it into action, this means you’re spending time with your clients, conducting pitches, and taking meetings.
What this method does so effortlessly gives sales people is a time management process that, if adhered to, generates outstanding results.
AT THE COAL FACE
It’s reported that only 5% of people remember statistics from presentations yet 63% can recall the stories, this is because telling stories is one of the most powerful techniques sales people have to communicate ideas and encourage change.
Here is mine, I was two weeks into the throws of an exciting new the job in a company that was really going places, it had a phenomenal product, ethos and company culture to boot.
Needing to prove my value and sales figures quickly, I began reaching out to my book of contacts to update them of my recent move and also to see their availability for a meeting to introduce them to the new products I was now selling.
I got in touch with clients that over the course of the passed 12 months I had diligently stayed in touch with despite no actual sales. Each time I had got rejected I made a note to touch base two months later to ‘check in’.
Checking in with clients is one of the biggest sources of information, it keeps you top of mind and allows you uncover a host of valuable feedback, let alone what the client is thinking. This process is called Following Back and can is one of the most critical and under-utilised methods of revenue generation there is in the field of sales.
The client came back to me and scheduled an introductory meeting for a couple of weeks’ time and I fully anticipated them to reschedule as the meeting date as the date got closer but the very next day they asked me to come in right away.
They wanted to explore the possibility of working together on a piece of business that covered multiple markets and would begin next week.
To give you some context, to get to this position it has taken:
2x cold emails
1x introductory meeting (rescheduled twice)
6x follow up emails (12-month period)
Constant knock-backs
I MOVED COMPANYS
Process continues
1x intro email
Knock back, intro meeting scheduled in 2 weeks’ time
Sparked interest
Meeting scheduled the next day
36x emails, 3 days and 1x contract signed
Feeling Awesome — long term client potential — priceless!
The point I am making is that in order to have a pipeline that is healthy and leads to impressive sales figures you must make it a point to consistently follow back without fail, then when it comes time to act you must rise to the challenge to help your clients by providing services that add value.
All of which brings me to say, to be a top sales person you must invest in your sales process, you must work it, day in and day out, to bring your clients closer, understand their agenda and work to be there when they need you.
Bio
Tim Castle is an Author, Speaker and Success Coach, his book The Art of Negotiation has helped thousands take their negotiations to the next level. His second book Be The Lion has been Shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020.
