Sales Goal Success – Daily Behaviors for Small Business

Sales Goal Success – Daily Behaviors for Small Business:from Business 2 Community by Bob Urichuck
As a small business, do you set sales goals?
If not, you are missing out on motivation, monitoring and measurement, and bottom line goal success.
As a salesperson or small business owner you have to demonstrate appropriate behavior. One of the most important behaviors is to set goals, monitor and measure them, make adjustments as you go, and strive for their accomplishments.
First, you have to be constantly filling the sales funnel with suspects — qualifying them to become prospects, making presentations, acquiring new business and continuing to follow up.
Second, you have to maintain and expand existing customers, handle requests, go to meetings, and maintain a positive and enthusiastic attitude. As a small business owner or salesperson, you are expected to demonstrate a multitude of behaviors.
You also have to know your behavioral ratios.
For example:

• How many telephone calls do you have to make to get a face-to-face appointment?
• How many appointments turn into a presentation?
• How many presentations result in a sale?

If you don’t know your ratios, you will need to track your behaviors. It is not all that difficult and well worth the effort in the long run.
Simply list the working days of the month down the left side of the page and then, identify all the behaviors you perform on a daily basis. Each day track those behaviors by occasion or time with your CRM. The objective is to keep track of your daily behaviors on a monthly basis and determine the time awarded to your averages or ratios. Sequentially, this will help you plan your behaviors and achieve greater results.

Let me describe how tracking my behaviors helped me become more organized, improve my timing, and also, how led to more sales.
At one stage in my life, I wanted to learn everything I could about franchising, so I decided to sell franchises. The franchising company provided me with leads from the advertising sector and I got inquiries through a toll free 1-800 number. Each day they would send me a batch of leads to follow up. I decided to track my behaviors and results from the very beginning, so that I could measure the feasibility of what I was doing. I was on a full commission structure – paid only on results.
The first thing I did was created a simple form listing each day of the month down the left-hand side of the page. Across the top, I had headings which referred to the items I wanted to track. My work was related more to telephone work than face to face and this was promoted nationally. I had headings such as: dials, connected, left message, call #2, fax, mailing, follow up, trip, presentation, and close.
Each day I sat down at my desk to follow up on leads and I would have my form in front of me. I would make a mark under each heading that applied to the behavior I was conducting. At the end of each week and the end of the month, I would total up my behaviors and identify the ratios. After three months, I concluded my average ratios:

• It took 150 dials to get 100 contacts
• 100 suspect contacts to get 5 qualified prospects
• 15 qualified prospects to get 3 to take a trip to H.O. at their expense
• 1 out of 3 to buy into the franchise

All of this meant that I would have to make 300 contacts or 450 dials to get one sale. When I worked it out financially, that one sale equaled $5.00 per dial. If I wanted to make more sales and more money, what would I have to do? Obviously, make more dials.
I had to face plenty of rejection. Imagine being rejected 285 times out of three hundred calls. Discouraging, isn’t it? Well, I had an idea to combat this. I discovered I only obtained 5 potential prospects out of 100 leads. I qualified the prospects to get to a “No” quicker. Each time I hung up the phone following a “no”, I would sing “another one bites the dust, another one gone, another one gone, this is bringing me closer to my “Yes”, YES”. Then, I would dial the next number. This little chant kept me positive and enthusiastic.
Undoubtedly, if I hadn’t tracked my behavior, I would have probably given up because of constant rejection.
The other lesson that I learned before actually doing any tracking, was noticing the time of day that I was calling. I realized that most of the prospects had jobs and had left their home phone number not their business number. After a while, I decided to have my office attain more information during the initial call in order to determine the best time to call and where I was calling. I became increasingly more productive, and more successful.
Think about your business. Where is your time going? Are you getting your best R.O.T.I. (return on time invested)? Only when you track your daily behaviors and now your ratios, can you then focus on the behaviors that will give you the best R.O.T.I.