Do you want to exceed your sales targets?

Selling is helping people you find, but it all starts with finding people to help. So when
it comes to prospecting just how much is enough? Rather than me looking at how many
prospects I may arbitrarily believe is reasonable for you, lets use some simple
mathematical extrapolation to arrive at a reasonable number you can generate for
yourself. For this exercise we need to look at stages of development from suspect to
customer.
To begin, we need to determine some metrics. The questions we need to ask are as
follows:
1. Whats your NEW revenue target, or if working with a team whats the target of
each rep?
2. Whats the average revenue of each existing customer? (Total revenue divided by
number of customers)
3. How many phone calls to leads (suspects) does it take to generate 1 appointment?
4. How many appointments does it take to generate 1 qualified prospect (Has a need,
has the authority to buy, and has the money)
5. How many qualified prospects does it take generate 1 new customer?
Since I dont know what your actual conversion ratios are, Ill use some generic numbers
to illustrate and you can plug in your own numbers later:
1. It takes 10 phone calls to get 1 new appointment.
2. It takes 10 appointments to generate 1 new active qualified lead or prospect.
3. It takes 10 active leads or prospects to generate 1 new client.
Using this information, its now a simple matter to generate real target numbers for your
critical sales activities.
I dont know what your revenue targets are, but lets say that based on the new revenue
target and the average revenue per customer we determine that you or each rep needs to
produce 10 new clients this year reasonable? Again, plug in your own numbers, but
from here we can work backwards to determine activity:
1. Since it takes 10 active leads to get one client and we want 10 clients, we need
100 active leads.
2. Since it takes 10 appointments to get one new active lead and we want 100 active
leads, we need 1000 appointments.
3. Since it takes 10 phone calls to suspects to get one appointment and we want 1000
appointments, we need to make 10,000 phone calls.
Whoa! Slow down, you say. 10,000 calls! How am I going to do that? Well, the
simple answer is discipline, applied one day at a time. So lets break this down into daily
activity:

10,000 calls divided by 260 working days per year = 38 prospecting calls per day.
Lets conservatively assume 5 minutes per call. This number is high because
included in the 38 calls per day are no pickups, prospect unavailable, voicemail
etc., which take only 30 seconds each.
So, 38 calls times 5 minutes each = 190 minutes of prospecting every day. 190
minutes divided by 60 minutes per hour = 3 hours of prospecting per rep. In
actual fact some calls will be short some will be long, so a strict discipline to a
minimum 2 hours or 38 calls per day, and you should be OKAY.
1000 appointments divided by 260 working days per year = 4 appointments with
active leads per day.

Lets see now: 2 hours of prospecting and 4 appointments per day, these look like pretty
realistic daily numbers to me. The question is: Do you and / or your team have the
will to do it?
Paretos law or the 80/20 rule applies to just about everything and if you want to build a
business, in the early stages you should probably spend 80% of your time working on
generating new business and 20% of your time servicing it. If you commit to that your
portfolio will grow. Once youve built your customer base, you can shift your activity to
spending 80% of your time servicing and 20% prospecting.
As you and/or your team gets into the habit of achieving these targets, your proficiency
will begin to increase and your conversion ratios from call to appointment will increase.
As your conversion ratio from appointment to prospect increases and your conversion
ratio from Prospect to Client also increases, these numbers become less daunting and the
freedom that selling can provide will materialize.
Heres a suggestion for you: Keep a phone log to keep track how many phone calls you
make each day and how many appointments you get out of all those phone calls. Make
two columns on a sheet. Every time you dial out just make a mark in one column. Every
time you get an appointment put a mark in the second column. Keep track of this for a
month, you will arrive at your true conversion ratios but youll also see your effectiveness
increase.