| Top Story |
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| This is a weekly column transcribed from my Radio Show. The "Top Story" is the major discussion each week in which I address in great depth and detail, aspects of selling that are pertinent to your job everyday. |
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I have a new client that is in a very, very interesting and challenging position. Let me tell you why. As I've talked about on this show before, there are basically four types of sales prospects that we could go after. It's what I call the prospecting matrix. Imagine for a moment a box with four quadrants. On the top of your box you would have what I call products or services. There are only two categories. There are current product offerings and new or potential product offerings. That's the top of the box. Down the left side of the box there are only two types of people or organizations. There are current customers, people who are buying from us today, and there are prospects, people who are not yet buying from us.
As you look at that matrix you will see that the first part of the matrix, the top left-hand corner, is offering current products to current customers. That is the route type sales where you go back over and over again. People have inventory, and you check the inventory. When the inventory is low you replenish. I'm not degrading that. It's a great and important part of the sales process. It tends to be the easiest. A lot of large companies have what they call detail men and detail women. That's all they do is go in to customers and check inventory and replenish. It's a great aspect of selling; it's not as challenging as others.
The second quadrant, the top right quadrant, is introducing new products to current customers. Just today I ran a sales meeting, and that's what we talked about with about 35 salespeople. We talked about how to add on, or cross-sell, or introduce new ideas to your current customers. It's the easiest way to double-digit growth.
The bottom left-hand quadrant is going after a new market and introducing a product that you're really good at. This is the best way to act on referrals where you go out and you get your current customers and your centers of influence to refer you to people whom they know that you don't know. Then you simply introduce products that you are really good at, and that's another way to go about building your business.
This brings us to quadrant four. Quadrant four is introducing a brand-new or potential product to a brand-new audience. It's people who don't know you, who have no rapport with you, and you're introducing a new product that they've never heard of and maybe you've never heard of. It's what I call the pioneering or the trail-blazing quadrant. The reason I call it the pioneering or the trail-blazing quadrant is because I'm relating it to the pioneers who settled this great continent. If you think about that analogy, what happened to so many of the people as they pioneered and settled the country from east to west? A lot of people never made it. They starved. They got run over by Conestoga wagons. They got attacked by bandits. The pioneering or the trail-blazing quadrant is a very challenging part of the sales business. If that's all you have, it is fraught with rejection.
Now back to my main story and why we're talking about keeping score in selling, my new client finds themselves in a quadrant four position. They have a brand new product, and they're offering it to a brand new audience. There's another wild card, and that is the whole the sales force we hired is brand new. So it's sort of like the triple whammy: new people selling a new product to a new audience. You can imagine that it is one of the most challenging positions to be in.
Why is it so important therefore to keep score? It's important to keep score because with that very razor thin chance of error or success, and the high volume of calls that need to be made, and the high level of rejection that the people are going to encounter, when you add all those things up, it's very important to know exactly what's going on: how many calls are being made, what's being said, and what the response is. Because there is such a slim chance of success anyway, we need to do everything in our power to increase those ratios of successful calls to the initial call.
What should we track? What is important to track especially if you're in a trail-blazing type environment? This statistical approach I'm going to share with you works no matter what quadrant you're working in. If you're a new business selling a new product or if you're already a current supplier assigned to current customers, the same statistics apply. They are much more important in the trail-blazing quadrant.
What I did is help my client create an Excel spreadsheet. You could do the same thing using one of the contact management programs like Act or Goldmine. You could do it based on using sheets of paper or 4x6 index cards for all I care. What I suggest to people is that they monitor the following statistics. Bear with me because there is a lot of information I'm going to share with you. But it's very important, and it's new information, something I haven't talked about before on my show.
Let's look at it. On a day-by-day basis what we want to track is a whole number of statistics. The first one is called Attempts or Dials or Approaches. Since I'm working with a client that's doing all the work by phone, we're calling it Dials. How many times a day, or half-day, or an hour do you actually pick up the phone and dial a number? That's the first thing we want to track.
The second thing we want to track is called Contacts Made or Decision-Makers Reached. For this particular client we're calling it Decision-Makers Reached or Decision-Makers Contacted.
When you have two statistics that gives you an opportunity to make a comparison. These first two statistics are very important. Why? If I pick up the phone and I dial 50 times and I get through to two decision-makers, do you think I need help in what I'm saying, how to work with receptionists, how to make sure you're not treating them like "rejectionists" or gatekeepers or screeners? The answer is yes because the average in most major metropolitan areas is that you will get through to about one-third of the people you dial. This means if you dial 60 people, you'll get through to 20 of them.
Do you see why it's so important to be able to keep score and have statistics to measure, to have what to track, how to track it, and what all these different activities and ratios mean? You can diagnosis your very own sales issues or if you're a manager who's looking at the statistics from your sales group, you have an opportunity to find out exactly where you can help these salespeople.
The next statistic I like to measure is called Appointments Set. This works more in setting appointments, where you're trying to use the phone to make the face-to-face appointment. In the case of this particular client I'm working with, this entire product is being sold over the phone, so that statistic is something we're not measuring. I want to mention it here because it's important to understand if you contact ten decision-makers and you get no appointments, my understanding of that statistic would be that you're trying to sell your product or service over the phone instead of offering or selling the appointment. The general rule with that statistic is that if you contact 10 people, you ought to be able to set appointments with 3 of them, about one-third. This means that 70% of the time you're going to be rejected.
The next statistic I like to track is called Needs Identified. That simply means that you're entering into a dialog with the other person, with the prospect, to start asking them about their current situation, what their needs are, what they like, what they don't like, what they would look for in a new product or service. That whole category is what I call Needs Identified. If you're looking at Decision-Makers Contacted 10 and Needs Identified 0, that tells me as a manager and as an understander of statistics that you're not asking questions. You're going right from contacting the decision-maker to "pitching" your solution. You're not asking enough questions.
The next category is called Solutions Presented. This means that once you have somebody on the phone and you're asking this person a lot of questions, are you making that bridge? I would suggest that in phone-to-phone selling, which is what I'm working with this particular client on now, if you contact 10 people and you have a chance to identify needs of 5, you'd better have 5 solutions presented. Once you have somebody on the phone and you've identified their needs, you have to take that transition step and start telling them how your product or service fits in with the needs you've identified.
The next statistic is the most important of all and that's called Commitments Asked For. As I've said before, so many people just keep talking and never stop to ask somebody if they want to buy or if they're interested or how they're doing so far. By having that statistic measurable, if I go through a whole list of calls that someone's made and realize that they're not asking anybody to do anything, then I realize they need help in learning how to ask obligating questions.
The next statistic is called Commitments Received. If you ask 10 people for the order and you only get 1 to say yes, I'd go back to the quality of your questions because 1 out of 10 is an unacceptable percentage of people buying out of people who are asked to buy. The average salesperson usually gets 2-3 out of 10, or 20-30% out of 10, and top salespeople can move that number up to 50% or more. So again, do you see why it's so important to have these statistics that are laid out, that are measurable?
There are two other statistics that I like to measure. These are more in an advanced selling are. I'm not necessarily doing it with the company I'm working with in Chicago. These are Referrals Requested and Referrals Received. Once you have somebody on the phone if they're not a prospect, why don't you ask who else might be? Or if they have a high level of excitement, they think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, then again ask them who else they know that might benefit from the same product or service.
This is what I call keeping score or keeping track in the selling game.
I've been working with this new client for about two weeks. They've been monitoring their statistics for ten days. Interestingly enough, the president of the company is someone I've known for a number of years and worked with on a number of projects. I know how he thinks, and he knows how I think. He knew, for example, that I was going to talk to all the salespeople one-on-one yesterday. I had phone conferences scheduled every 15 minutes with a salesperson. I was looking at the statistics. I knew what the problems were. I knew how to diagnosis their issues. So in that 15-minute conversation I could do a lot of coaching and redirecting of energy with all these various salespeople. The night before I was to make these calls, I got an email from the president of the company. He had been looking at the same statistics I had been looking at, and he said, "When you talk to Bob, ask him why or how he's getting through to 60% of the people, which we both know is above average. And when you talk to Sally ask her how she is finding out so many people who are interested compared to the rest of us who are only finding out maybe 1 out or 50. How come Sally is getting 3 out of 40." So he went through each statistic. He knows what the ratios are, and I know what the ratios are. He was able to point out areas of great need as well as areas of great strength. So when I got a chance to talk to the individuals I could find out what they were doing well, and I could work that into the rest of the people's planned approach. Then we hooked them up into a group meeting after I was done with the one-on-one conversations so they could share with each other what they were doing, having them highlight why one statistic was working better than another.
This is an amazingly powerful concept for any sales organization, for any salesperson, for any sales manager. Figure out what you want to track. Put together some type of easy format. It doesn't have to be an Excel spreadsheet. The reason we're doing it that way is because we've got people in Minneapolis, people in Chicago, I'm in Iowa, the president travels all the time, and we need to be able to coordinate all our efforts on this project together, and electronically is the best way to do it. Like I said, you could lay these statistics out on a 4x6 card, and then you could keep track just by putting little hash marks.
For those of you whose minds are now hurting from all the statistical analysis I've shared with you today, and for those whose minds are not hurting, what I've shared with you is the best diagnostic tool. It's kind of like the Hammacker-Schlemmer catalog when they showed the best pants presser and the best screw driver set, I have just shared with you the best diagnostic tool for salespeople. It's called keeping score, knowing what to track, how to track it, putting it all together and seeing what it means in terms of activities and ratios, and then knowing how to diagnose your own sales issues.
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Unlearning
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Keeping Score
Keeping score in selling is as important as keeping score in a baseball game. Knowing what statistics to measure...
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– Warren
Wechsler |
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