Why Your Professional Selling Skills Don’t Matter
Written by Brandon Hull on October 15, 2005. Leave a Comment on this Post.
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If you’re reporting your daily or weekly activity to a sales manager, welcome to the world of High Activity Selling.
If your product or service can be sold to a wide variety of businesses or individuals — large or small — you’re involved in High Activity Selling whether you’ve given it thought or not.
Maybe you’ve been trained in consultative selling skills. Or professional selling skills. Or super-strategic, high-level selling and negotation skills. It doesn’t matter, you’re really in the world of High Activity Selling.
Right after your actual performance and projected performance, your manager and the executive he or she reports to is checking in on … hold on here, this gets very complicated … how many sales calls you’re making.
High Activity Selling means no matter what you may believe about the complexity of your product, service, or even your industry, your primary sales emphasis should be on maintaining a high enough activity level to ensure success. You should first plan your time and discipline yourself to simply making enough calls to generate enough significant contacts.
Among the numbers that you ought to be measuring:
- First-time appointments.
- Interviews (”needs assessments”).
- Proposals/presentations.
- Closes.
If you prospect over the phone or cold call in-person, you should also track the number of calls you make. On the phone, you should be tracking how many calls per hour, how many live contacts with decision-makers, and how many appointments you set from those contacts.
Beyond your pure activity (which requires no skill, only energy and discipline), you should be tracking your sales success ratios , primarily:
- Presentation ratio.
- Closing ratio.
Your presentation ratio is the percent of first-time appointments you go on that yield one presentation. And your closing ratio can be measured in several ways, for example: 1) the number of first-time appointments necessarily to produce one close; or 2) the number of presentations necessary to produce one close.
Measuring your activity and success ratios are the keys to succeeding in High Activity Selling. Subscribe now to our free downloads and you’ll gain immediate access to a powerful quarterly activity report you can put to use immediately to track activity and selling ratios for you personally or a team.
What are some common closing ratios across industry?
Great question, Greg. What industry are you most interested in, or what industry are you in now?
Check back to the site, I’ll add a blog post on that in the very near future too…
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Thanks and regards,
Rauf