As we discussed in the last article, having a sales process for you and your team to follow has the biggest impact on the profitability of your business.

I was having a coffee with a very successful business coach recently and he commented that the greatest threat to the many businesses he had coached over the years was the lack of sales systems which resulted in inconsistent sales.

Rather than investing in developing salespeople to convert more of the inquiries coming into the business or even better giving them systems to proactively develop new leads and convert, many business owners throw more money into advertising and marketing in an attempt to generate more enquiries rather than convert more of the opportunities they are already getting.

I’m not suggesting you stop your marketing and advertising – what I am leading to is you need to maximize the enquiries you are currently getting by systemizing your sales process into a standard operating procedure (SOP)

Sales are like baking a cake – if you put the right ingredients/activities in in the right amounts and follow the recipe/sales process, you will end up in both cases with a great result.

Sales success like baking can be repeated once you have found the ingredients/processes that work.

For many salespeople flying by the seat of their pants and reinventing the recipe each time has become a way of life.

Studies have proven that the most successful salespeople in any field have set activities and processes that they do religiously. At a business forum I spoke at last week one of the other speakers spoke about “patterns of success” which Brian Tracey the famous Sales Guru calles “modeling” and in earlier days Napoleon Hill called “success steps”. What all three of them were talking about is that for every thing we wish to achieve in life somebody else has already achieved and found the best way to do it. Therefore for you to achieve your goal in the shortest time it is only a matter of following the processes that they have already found to be the best.

The first place to start in sales is with the numbers i.e. What is my sales target for the year?

If we know this we can work all our sales activities back from this.

The equation is:

Sales Target ÷ Average Sale = No. of sales for year
No of sales needed ÷ Conversion Ratio = No. of presentations
No. of presentations ÷ Referral Conversion Ratio = No. of referrals
No. of referrals ÷ 48 weeks = No. of referrals needed per week

e.g. 100,000 ÷ 1000 = 100 sales needed for year
100 ÷ 50% conversion = 200 presentations
200 ÷ 80% referral conversion = 250 referrals needed
250 ÷ 48 weeks = 5.2 referrals per week

Now we know how many referrals needed we can work out our prospecting activities.

Time to work out your numbers.

We will look at the next step in my next article.

Quote of the Week:

Chinese Proverb –

Man stand for long time with mouth open before roast duck fly in.


Brett Burgess is a Sales Trainer and Programme Developer for Sales Impact Group Limited.