Tip 1: 173 is the most important number in sales.
173. This number should always be in the back of every salesperson’s mind because it’s the number of selling hours every salesperson has every month.
Why is it so important?
Because, how you use your time will reflect your overall performance.
Salespeople can get bogged down with too many non-selling tasks that consume their time. Activities such as administration, supporting existing customers, internal meetings and researching, can have a detrimental impact on those precious 173 hours.
Here’s how a typical salesperson will spend their time:
As you can see, only 35% of their time is spent actually selling. Their performance will be monitored by revenue per sales hour X time spent selling.
For example:
1 hour = $1,000 revenue
173 x 35% = 60.5 hours
60.5 x $1,000 = $60,500 per month.
Now imagine you could free up just an additional 10% selling time by reducing admin tasks or improving your customer service process. This would then look like this:
1 hour = $1,000 revenue
173 x 45% = 77.8 hours
77.8 x $1,000 = $77,800 per month.
Just a simple change in process or introducing the right technology to each salesperson could see a monthly revenue increase of $17,300, or 28.6%.
Now multiply that number by your entire sales team and suddenly your sales performance is looking a lot healthier and you’re on the road to buying that new Ferrari!
- How to free up an extra 10% or more selling time
- Simplify your CRM data by removing non-essential fields and ensure meeting preparation is easy to log.
- Use sales automation tools to help automate processes that are currently manual like sending emails, syncing calendars or adding information into your CRM from a back office system.
- Make marketing collateral easier to find by storing it into a single place so you don’t have to hunt it down.
- Use sales analytics tools to look through your business data and tell you when to follow up with a prospect to minimize wasted phone calls.
- Ensure that your customer service team are the point of contact after the sale to stop you being dragged into support queries.
Did you find this tip useful?
Check out the second article of the series below - (Tip 2/5)
