Loss of time common to sales professionals

So very few small businesses collect and use statistics about the effectiveness of activities related to the sales process, and therefore many business owners and sales managers are insisting that their staff to undertake activities that are time-wasting, and robbing both the company and the sales staff of income.

Case Study - Real Estate

A famous agency has insisted that his sales staff to spend an hour a day door to knock on their neighborhood, introducing himself to homeowners who might be potential sellers. At the same time has insisted that the telephone contact was made, nor was there any strategic approach to telemarketing.

The collection and statistical analysis showed that the door knocking was not an effective use of time your sales team, and that greater coverage, with better results could be achieved by having a strategic in-house telemarketing program that has developed a strong loyalty and public profile.

Other losses of time

Here is a brief list of other activities that are too inefficient for the seller to spend time on and / or even prevent the sales staff to engage in sales activities:

Hanging around shopping centers handing out brochures

Letterbox drop

Sponsorship (unless you are a well-planned strategy, not just a self-contained action)

Casual Drop ins (unless they are existing customers, and have been programmed not only to fall back on exploration, because it is seen as the most difficult option)

Giving corporate gifts and souvenirs for people before they become customers (it's like a tangent of bad taste!)

Bidding on the basis of a verbal agreement - or formalities, doh!

Not having an approved program of activities, not diarising, documentation, monitoring or analysis of these activities

Be inexplicable

Allowing proven sales activities must be put aside (for example, do not turn up at a networking event because a client called - unless that client is to leave the country, this is clearly stupid because you are killing the goose that lays eggs of gold)

Turning office hours in a fiscal year

How to measure the property So you choose the most effective way

There is only one way, and this is to know your stats. Having a written plan of your sales activities, schedule them on a very narrow base, track their results, and analyze the results regularly. If an activity can not justify its existence or to compete against more efficient operations, dropped like a hot cake!

If you set this on a well-formulated spreadsheet will automatically spit out statistics significant, on a daily basis. Very few companies do this, and that is why so very few companies actually survive. No one could dispute the fact that it would be silly to try to run a free society to keep financial records - and yet the majority of small and medium businesses run their sales team, without the keeping of appropriate activities! They track every dollar and cent, but does not keep track of time is used. In some ways is good for that part of the business to be a sort of black box.

Very rarely do companies keep the type of statistical data needed to develop the equation Unique Selling each sales accurately. The use that is developed on this day will serve as the basis for concerted action by the seller, and must be completed in the coming months.

Analyze the data as you collect, for each person as well as for the whole team. Want to know the conversion rates, and rates of effectiveness in relation to each activity. For example, there may be an overall conversion rate of 30% of appointments. However, a sales person can easily have a rate of 30% conversion efficiency references to appointments, while another may have 10%, yet their overall conversion rate is the same appointment. These data are absolute gold for you and your company because you can pinpoint where and how superior performance is happening (and teach this to others), as well as pinpoint substandard performance which is happening and address it .

If a sales-oriented company is not maintaining and using these types of records, is blind and survive on pure luck. It 's just a matter of time before being overtaken by a catastrophe that has not seen it coming .......