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A framework for effective sales management (tip 5 of 5).

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Tip 5: Reverse planning of your sales activity.

Sales is one of the few professions where metrics can be captured at every stage of the process. From the number of prospecting calls to the number of meetings and conversion rates for closing to total revenue.

Knowing these metrics puts you in a great position because you’ll know precisely the level of activity that’s needed to yield the desired results.

To gain this knowledge, you need to reverse plan your sales process. All the figures should be available in your phone system, diary planner, CRM, and back office system. In many cases, all this information may be in one place.

As a rule of thumb, you should know the numbers for each of these for your suspect plan:

 

  • Quota
  • Average order value
  • of orders
  • Proposals
  • Discussions
  • Appointments
  • Enquiries
Target $10,000
Average order value $250
No. of orders 40
Proposals 52
Discussions 68
Appointments 120
Inquiries 200

You should also look into your activities as these will drive your suspect plan:

 

  • Account development visits
  • Sign up visits
  • Follow up visits
  • First meetings
  • Telephone appointment making
  • Qualification of enquiries
Account development visits 200
Sign up visits 300
Follow up visits 350
First meetings 420
Telephone appointment making 550
Qualification of enquiries 1,200

Once you know your numbers you can start to work out your time plan:

 

  • Days available in the month.
  • Deduct: admin time, internal meetings and holidays.

= total selling time available

  • Time required for activity plan.
  • Is it achievable?

 


If the time plan is unachievable to hit your targets, you need to make changes to your process.

 

Is there anywhere you can improve your conversion rates? For example, can you improve your ‘appointments’ to ‘no. of orders’ from 33% to 50%?

This would give you an additional $5,000 revenue at your current average order value.

Now if you were to improve your average order value by $50 too, you would gain revenues of $18,000, nearly double your original revenue, without improving your number of enquiries.

This is why sales enablement is so important.

Arming yourself with the right tools and processes to raise conversion rates through improved analytics to have better conversations or saving time by utilizing a CRM system effectively is what makes you stand out above every other salesperson in your team.

Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed our ‘A Framework for Effective Sales Management’ series and gained some useful information to use in your role.

For more information about how software can help every salesperson hit their targets, contact us today.

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