Salescraft Training
Learn to sell anything to anyone!
Who is your avatar?
You know what you're selling, but what is your customer buying? Hint... it may not be what you think!
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Salescraft Training
Transform Your Sales Strategy for Lasting Impact
What if you could turn your high-pressure sales role into a streamlined, stress-free powerhouse of productivity? Unlock the secret to enhancing sales efficiency by focusing on the right metrics and prioritizing productivity over busyness. In our latest episode, we break down actionable strategies for reducing stress in sales, emphasizing the importance of understanding your entire sales process. From initial contact to closing the deal, we discuss how tools like CRM systems can help you analyze conversion rates at each stage, guiding you to actions that truly drive success.
This episode is your guide to balancing work and personal life while maximizing sales effectiveness. Learn the art of pinpointing your ideal client and crafting a sales strategy that prioritizes repeat business to boost profit margins with minimal resources. We delve into the essentials of spending your time wisely, minimizing the effort on acquiring new clients, and instead nurturing relationships with those most likely to purchase. Tune in to transform how you approach your sales strategy, ensuring your business is both successful and sustainable in the long run.
If you have a sales problem you'd like to hear covered in a podcast, please contact me directly. Or, my sales training programme might help!
If you'd like help to improve your sales confidence, please jump onto my free (1 hour) on-demand webinar. I'll teach you three things you can apply immediately, including handling objections and closing a sale.
Graham Elliott
You can contact me at graham@salescraft.training
My website is www.salescraft.training
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Hello again. In the last podcast, if you listened to that, I spoke about how you can develop habits to eliminate stress, or at least one way of eliminating stress. Now, sales, I think, is one of the most stressful occupations you can have. Obviously, the air traffic controllers might disagree, but that's another level of stress. But if you are in sales, it is stressful because it's a very visible kind of occupation to have within a business. If you're employed as a salesperson, because it's very obvious within, certainly within your sales team, when things are going well and when they're not going so well. And if other people are doing really well and you're not, that can apply a lot of extra pressure. So this is where the stress can come from. If you're an entrepreneur, the stress is even worse in one sense, in that this is your livelihood. You may have people working for you, so if the sales aren't happening, it's not just your livelihood that's at risk, but also theirs. So I hope I'm not adding to your stress, but this is certainly one aspect of it. I hope I'm not adding to your stress, but this is certainly one aspect of it. So what I was talking about last time is, I think, very important because it helps to prioritize, and one of the things that I find people tend to do, particularly when things are not going well, is that they get very busy but they're not particularly efficient. So they just do whatever's in front of them so that they're busy, busy, busy, but at the end of the day, they haven't really achieved very much and they've not done much to dig themselves out of a situation that is perhaps not going so well. They've, if anything, made the situation worse because they've been focusing on the wrong things. So I'm going to assume that, if that is the situation that you're in, you've listened to the previous podcast and hopefully that's been helpful.
Speaker 1:What I want to do in this podcast is just talk a little bit about understanding the metrics that are important, and this sort of goes hand in hand with what I spoke about last time, because if you are in sales and if you're running a business, there are certain metrics that are really important, and unfortunately, in my experience I found that a lot of people who aren't doing so well in sales one of the reasons they're not doing well is they actually don't know what metrics they should be looking at. And if you don't know what you should be looking at, you're likely to be in real trouble because the chances are you're focusing on entirely the wrong things and you're just making things more difficult for you. So what are the metrics that you should be looking at? What do I even mean by that? By metrics, I simply mean which numbers should you be looking at. What is it by metrics? I simply mean which numbers should you be looking at.
Speaker 1:So there's a couple of things here I want to talk about, and the first one is your sales process. Now, I don't know what it is you sell. I don't know what your sales process is. I mean, I'm hoping you do know what your sales process is. If not, what I mean by sales process is simply what are the steps, the repeated steps that you follow from your first contact with a prospective customer through to signing the deal, getting the sale. So there are likely to be very discrete steps in that process, so steps that you repeat each time. So it may be that you, let's say, you send out a LinkedIn invitation to connect that might be your very first step to someone who's stone cold, and then certain things happen. There might be a follow-up, you might get an acceptance, you might do an introduction, you might have a telephone call, you maybe have a meeting that might be a Zoom meeting or a face-to-face meeting and you might put in a proposal or a quote or an offer of some sort, and then there's a decision and a sale or not. But what I'm identifying here are very clear steps that you go through, from first contact with that client through to an order.
Speaker 1:Now yours might be different to what I've just described, so the important thing here is to know what that process is. Once you know what that process is, the more important thing and this can be tricky if you're not really managing your customer contacts. So hopefully you have a CRM of some sort, a customer relations management system of some sort, where you log every contact with a client. So if you're doing that, you can work back and this is where you probably need to step back from doing the sales to actually getting a handle on what your processes are. But you can step back and recognize where you have contact with a client. And the next thing to do, having identified each of those stages, is to look at the conversion rate from one stage to another. So what do I mean by that?
Speaker 1:Well, in the case of well, let's take something kind of middle of that process and that might be where you're setting up a meeting which might be a qualifying meeting or it might be a demonstration, but some sort of face-to-face meeting with a client, and you do that by telephone. Maybe you're not using the phone so much these days. I absolutely recommend that you do, because there are really really good reasons that I'm not going to in this podcast why you should use a phone rather than send a message or an email or anything like that to set up a meeting. But it's your process. So for every phone call that you make with the purpose of setting up a meeting so very specific on the purpose and the desired outcome of that call how many meetings do you get?
Speaker 1:And you will come up with a number and you want to keep it. I mean, keep it simple, let's not go insane here. So let's use whole numbers. Simple, let's not go insane here. But so let's use whole numbers. But if it's generally one in four, that might be okay. But you need to recognize that for every four telephone calls you make set up a meeting, you get one meeting, or it might be better than that. It might be one in three, might be one in two even, which would be very good, or it might be one in five or one in eight or one in 10. If you're out there at the one in 10 part of it, I would say you've got a problem, and the reason simply is this takes up your time, and I'm going to talk about that and how you spend your time.
Speaker 1:But the key thing to understand is what is your current conversion rate at every stage in that process, and you need to decide for yourself whether or not that is an acceptable rate or, if it's not, what do you have to do to improve your conversion rate at that stage? Now, I can't answer that because I don't know what that is, but these are the kind of questions you need to be asking. If you don't know your numbers, by the way, most people will guess, and I will tell you now that they always like 90% plus. They are optimistic about their numbers. So if it's pretty horrible, you need to know it's horrible, because then you can fix it. But if you don't know and you continue on a process that is not delivering for you, you will not have a successful sales component to your business.
Speaker 1:Okay, so why is all of this stuff important. And in fact, there's one other thing I'm going to throw in here and that is to understand your ideal client, because these are the people you want to be spending time with and at the qualification process, so during those steps, so those steps in your sales process, there will most definitely be a qualification stage in there, possibly two. You really don't want more than that, because it kind of by implication says that you're really not identifying your best clients early on. You're spending too much time with people who won't buy with you. So that qualification process, you really have to get that down so that it's good. And you really ideally want to be spending one stage getting rid of the people that will never buy from you. And this is something that again I've seen this time and time again with salespeople who are struggling, they will speak to anybody and all they're doing is burning their time with people who will never buy from them. And it can be quite tough to say no to people, particularly if there's nobody in the pipeline. If your pipeline is very thin or maybe there's not much in there at all, you've got to go prospecting. It's very hard to turn people away, but it's absolutely vital that you do if they're the wrong people, because all they're going to do is burn your time. And this is the next thing I want to talk about in this podcast, because we all have a finite amount of time, so you really have to use it well.
Speaker 1:Now just to throw some numbers around, and these may apply to you, maybe they don't, but you need to come up with your own numbers. But if you are working let's say, 40 hours a week certainly if you're an entrepreneur, the chances are that's quite low. But look, the point is as well, you don't really want to be working 40 hours a week. I mean, why would you? Why not have a life-work balance? That is better than that. That's much more in your favor. But let's take 40, because numbers are sort of easy to work with. So 40 hours a week is pretty much an eight-hour day. If it's five-day week, that's kind of long. Some countries it's not so much, but there you have it.
Speaker 1:If you're working 40 hours a week over 48 weeks in the year, so there's 50 weeks in the year. So that's talking about four weeks in total in the year where you're not working. Again, that might seem ridiculously big to you, or it might seem ridiculously small and ideally you want to get your sales good enough that you can make that 48 weeks a big number. You know you don't want to be working that many weeks a year. So this is all about getting your sales process really efficient so that you are spending time with the right people and you're converting very efficiently. You're spending the minimum amount of time on every prospect. Spending the minimum amount of time on every prospect. So if you're working 40 hours a week over 48 weeks in a year, that's 1,940 hours that you're working every week. So this is where you need to start looking at how are you spending your time.
Speaker 1:And the other thing I will add if you're an entrepreneur and you're the business, the chances are you're not working 40 hours a week. On sales. You might be doing 20 hours a week. It might be two and a half days of the week is selling. Generally as a rule, particularly when you're starting out in business, if you have your own business, you're probably spending four days out of five actually looking for clients. So if that's where you're at, that's not unusual. It's probably frustrating if you actually want to be, for example, coaching or training or doing something like that. That's the fun part, and that's only one day a week on average. So you've got four days a week where you're doing stuff that you don't particularly enjoy, and the purpose of this podcast and the training that I offer is to actually help you to reduce that four days down to something smaller, so that you're making more sales but you're putting less effort into something that perhaps you don't enjoy doing that much. Okay, so you've got perhaps a maximum of just under 2,000 hours a year to get your business in, and it's really important that you do spend as much of that time as possible with clients who are going to buy from you. So that would be your ideal client. These are the people who buy from you.
Speaker 1:Remember, in sales, what we're doing is solving problems for people. That's essentially what sales is. If you think it's something else, you really need to rethink your approach to sales, because we are problem solvers for people and the key thing in finding clients is recognizing who are the people that have the problem that we can best solve. So that's really important. If you've been doing something different with your either qualifying or your marketing, if you're doing marketing, then you've been doing it wrong. So we're problem solvers, so we need to understand who our ideal client is and we do that by asking questions. And if you don't know what questions you need to ask to identify your ideal client, then just look at the people who you've sold to, where it's gone really well, and by that I mean you've had a good value, a good value of sale. The revenue number's been good, it's actually been profitable. This is a whole other podcast, but profitable sales are obviously really good. It's actually been profitable. This is a whole other podcast, but profitable sales are obviously really important. There's no point making sales if it's costing you money. I mean you might just as well give up. So they're profitable sales.
Speaker 1:And ideally, you are spending very little time post-sales problem solving. You're going to be doing follow-up visits. You want to do nurturing in some form with that client because you want to be looking for repeat business. If that is an aspect of the business that you had, now it's not for everyone. Some businesses are simply one-off sale, but a lot of businesses you do look for repeat sales. So, for example, if you're selling cars, you're hopefully going to have clients that come back again and again every time they want to change their car. Now, that might not be every year, it might be every two years, three years, four years, wherever it might be. And things change as the economy gets tough and it's not ideal at the moment and it's looking worse as I record this, with things moving forward. But you want that client to keep coming back to you because with repeat business it just means out of those 1920 hours that you have every year, some of those hours not very many of them but you're going to be spending a few hours with people who just want to buy from you again. So you cut out a whole load of your sales process when it comes to repeat business. And repeat business is absolutely gold for your business because it's low effort, usually high value, usually the margins are very high because it's not costing you very much to get that sale. So the sales that are trickiest are those new sales, those new customers. You have to go through a whole process of convincing them that you're good to buy from, you're going to deliver for them, that you're reliable, you're not going to let them down, all those things that they're looking for, and that's why getting the client in in the first place is much harder than getting repeat business.
Speaker 1:There's another topic there really about you know how. What proportion of your business should be repeat business? Well, ideally as much as possible, frankly, because that way this is where you get these situations where you're not spending so many hours a week selling because a lot of your business is repeat business. People are just coming to you wanting to buy. That's great. So this is what you need to be building up. So what I'm focused on here, though, with this whole sales process and look, a number that is worth having if you don't know already is what proportion of your business currently is repeat business and can you improve that? What can you do to improve that? But you do need to know your process, certainly for new clients and if most of your business is new clients because of the nature of what you do, then that's fine. You really need to be on top of that, and it's even more important that you understand what those processes are, what your conversion rates are and how well you're doing so.
Speaker 1:Again, just looking at the, to take that example of going from a telephone call and the purpose of that call is to set up a meeting. It might be a face-to-face or a Zoom meeting, but some sort of meeting where you get the bulk of the business done. How many calls do you make and how many meetings do you get as a result of those calls? So, for example, if you make four telephone calls to get one meeting, your conversion rate is one in four. So it's 25%. Is that good? I don't know how much time do you have to do that. This might not be ideal. You might want to aim to get it down to one in three, because as you make small improvements in each of your conversion rates, you'll find that the amount of effort you have to put in early on to get the business drops down considerably and you start getting a lot more efficient. And this is what it's all about getting very efficient at each stage. And that means that the time you have to spend in each stage reduces to get the same result in terms of sales. To spend in each stage reduces to get the same result in terms of sales.
Speaker 1:So let's say you've got a target of 500,000 pounds, dollars, euros, whatever it might be. If you have 1920 hours available to you and let's say that's your 40 hours a week, you need to be basically making 260 whatever units you're using per hour, and that's about 10 and a half thousand a week. So if you're thinking of the, you know half a million is your target. That's reasonable. That you'd want to bring in over 10,000 a week. That's um 48 weeks in a year Because, remember, you're not well. You may be getting sales in while you're away. That's brilliant if you are, but let's focus on what you're doing manually.
Speaker 1:So, whatever your numbers are, whatever your annual target is, look at what you should be bringing in every week based on the number of hours you have available, and are you achieving that? Is your target realistic? And this is one of the things that does catch people out and it's really important. A really important part of annual planning is is the target achievable with the time you have available? Knowing your sales steps and conversion rates in each one will also help you. There's a whole process you can go through there to get clear on that, but this is really important to sanity check what you're doing.
Speaker 1:So if you have a target of half a million in a year but you're bringing in 5,000 a week, you're not going to hit target. And it's really important that you identify that early on, because that way, if it's early in the year, if you realize that you're not hitting your sales target every week, you need to look at what you can do to improve that, and does that mean the target's realistic? Are there certain areas in your process where you're really not performing very well? What can you do with those? Do you have to change your approach entirely? Do you know your avatar? Where are you spending your time? Are you spending your time with people who will never buy from you? So I'm going to stop this conversation there, but I guess just to recap, I hope this has put a little light on things rather than created confusion.
Speaker 1:But what are the things I've really spoken about? So, first of all, I guess the first thing is we have so many hours a week and you have to be realistic about how many hours per week you can put into selling. So that is engaging in activities that result in new business or result in business, and most of that work will be on new customers rather than repeat business. Repeat business, as I've said, is absolutely brilliant and that will come from usually nurturing clients, and you might have a product or products that will come from usually nurturing clients and you might have a product or products that will lead to people repeat buying, for example, memberships and things like that. That's great because you sell a membership and then, ideally, people will just renew automatically, so you don't have to go through that whole sales process again with them.
Speaker 1:What are the steps with new business, the discrete steps that you go through, and what is your conversion rate at each one of those? So you really need to know those numbers to know where you're strong, where you're weak, which parts of that process are working well for you and which parts are not. You really have to understand that. You also need to know who your avatar is, because with a limited amount of resource which in this case, is your time, you've really got to be spending it with the people who are most likely to buy from you and give you good business. So there's no point selling to somebody who is high maintenance after the sale and you're just having to spend hours with them, maybe every week, solving problems for them. These people are not the people you want to be selling to. So who is your avatar? How do you know your avatar? Well, you can look at existing clients where it's gone really well, but you get clear on the problem that you're solving for them. That's fundamentally it.
Speaker 1:Sales is about problem solving, so you need to know what the problem is that you solve, who are the people who have that problem and, out of those people, who are the people that you can best serve, and any qualifying process that you have needs to exclude the people who do not fit that profile. So that's really important. Essentially, what you're looking at is high value, low effort clients. These are the people that you want, so I'm hoping that's been useful. If you do not know your processes and you're looking for somewhere to go, obviously this is something I cover in sales training, so you're welcome to look there.
Speaker 1:There are other things available online. Some are good, some are bad. You need to make that decision, but whatever you're doing, I hope that's given you some clarity on where to be spending your time. Last time we were talking about getting into discipline habits, so this goes some way to tell you what those habits should be, and this is definitely worth reviewing on a regular basis, I would say at least quarterly, as you come into a new quarter. Look at what you're doing, how efficient you're being, and look at change, and the sooner in the year you can do it, the better. The sooner you can identify problem areas and correct them, the better. Obviously because you don't want to reach the end of the year and be just so far behind that you can't possibly make your targets. Okay, thank you for your time and I will speak to you in the next podcast. Bye for now.