Measuring for Sales Success

You may have heard of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators).  Sales people live and die by the most obvious KPI – BUDGETS!!  But the truth is, if you only have a sales budget and no other testable, measureable KPI’s how do you expect to track and improve your sales.

Many small businesses I coach in sales initially think that the concept of testing and measuring is too difficult; in truth once you have grasped the concept and set up your matricies, it is EXTREMELY simple!!

For businesses without sales staff, it is critically important that you implement some strategies for Sales Measuring, otherwise you may find your business is not growing or earning enough income.  Just as you would measure the success of marketing dollars spent, you need to have a performance plan for your sales!

I am currently writing an e-book with a “Simple Sales Plan for Small Business” which will go into more detail, but here are some super quick and incredibly easy steps you can use measure your results and then set up your sales process!

1. How many prospects (ie: people you have had more than once point of contact with) generally turn into paying customers?
2. how many cold contacts (ie: people you have no previous relationship with) did it take to get those prospects?
3. how many times do you make contact before securing business from cold leads or prospects (eg: 2 phone calls, 1 email and 2 newsletters = 5 points of contact)?
4. how many new clients a week do you want?

Now you might not currently know the answers to all of these questions – don’t stress, it is easy to start implementing this at any stage of your business!  Write the above 4 questions down and stick them up around the office, ask other staff for their input, have a guess!  But once you commit to the awareness of thinking about the numbers and how many contacts lead to a client, you will start to come up with some working figures!

This doesn’t have to be an exact science – take a week or two to think it through, start to note how many cold contacts you deal with over that period, how many turn into prospects over the next few weeks/months and how many become customers!  Now it will totally depend on your service/product and industry, but generally the sales cycle for building a new customer is approximately 3 months.  So by the end of 3 months you should have more awareness of how many new clients you got in that time, how many prospects you have in your database for potential future business and how many “cold contacts” you started with.

Once you know these figures, you then decide how many new clients a week you want and make sure you diarise the time to contact enough cold leads to generate your magic number!!

PS: a tip from the Telemarketing side of Stellar Strategies, when you sit down to make prospecting calls you should be aiming for approximately 15 contact/s per hour!

See my blogs on Telemarketing Scripts and Top 10 Tips for Successful Telemarketing for some help on getting yourself set up for regular prospecting!

I hope these Stellar Sales Strategies help you improve your business!  I look forward to your comments or let me know if you have any questions or topics you would like to hear more about!

Tags: call script, cold calling, define result, forecast your success, increase business, measure results, objection handling, objections, outsource, outsource telemarketing, Phone Marketing, prospecting, Return on Investment, ROI, sales script, script, selling, Stellar Phone Sales, Stellar Strategies, Stellar Telemarketing, target market, telemarketing cold calling, telemarketing script, telemarketing services, terrified of the phone, top 10 tips telemarketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 26th, 2010 at 3:37 am and is filed under Sales Tips & Advice, Small Business Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.