Are you touching people in your business?
If you are not, then you should be. It might just help you increase sales. Of course I don’t mean that in a literal manner. I’m talking about reaching out and getting connected. In other words, prospecting for sales leads. Every time you make a connection with someone you are one contact closer to a sale.
If you’ve been a salesperson for any amount of time you might have been schooled on how you can increase business by making X number of contacts each day, each week, or each month. It’s called reaching out and touching someone. So if you touch 40 people per day, you should get about five leads and out of those leads you may get one sale. Or something like that. There are a variety of figures out there, but the methodology is sound. It’s a numbers game as we all know and you have to have the numbers there in order for them to work.
If you know this, ask yourself, are you actually putting it into practice? It might surprise you to start taking a long, hard look at your sales prospecting efforts. If you’ve long ago neglected to keep track of how many people you contact each day then maybe it’s time for a tune up on your sales skills. Maybe you should try to take accounting of the prospecting you do and the results of those efforts. Even if you think you already hold yourself accountable consider actually tracking your efforts to gain sales on paper. It’s often a different story when you see the numbers on paper. It will be tedious at first, especially if you are an experienced salesperson frustrated with your lower than average sales, but keep at it and you’ll start to see trends.
So many times we start out bold with our new sales knowledge obeying each sales strategy like it was written in stone and tracking those numbers with fine detail. Then somewhere along the line we get comfortable in our ways and methods and slack up on the accountability part of it. After all, there’s no one watching and we have a regular, repeat clientele. And so occasionally we cut off our prospecting time earlier or maybe we just get comfortable in the number of sales we are making and decide that is good enough.
That is until it all slows down. Then suddenly we ask “What happened?” What happened is that less and less emphasis was put on prospecting for clients and more emphasis was put on being comfortable. Unless you are extremely well-connected you probably can’t rely on a handful of clients to keep you in business. You need a higher number of connections, a lot more leads and a ton of sales. Without continual prospecting those sales plummet.
To combat that sales slump try getting back to tracking the number of people you touch. Yes, even if you’ve been in sales for decades getting back to the basics will help put things into perspective. It can clue you in to whether it’s trends in the economy that are hurting your business or whether it’s trends in your work habits.
Start out by keeping a simple notebook at your desk devoted to keeping you accountable for your progress. Track the number of new contacts as well as how many old contacts you’ve touched base with. Track the number of leads and track the number of sales. Track your daily, weekly and monthly totals. Then refer to those numbers often. Try to increase them incrementally each day or week. If you increase the number of contacts you make on a daily basis you are bound to gain clients.
Incidentally this also works for your website or blog. Whether you want to make more sales online or if you are simply looking to increase your follower count, touching people online each day, the same way you would offline will help you make more connections and gain more followers. Try setting a goal, a number of people through blogs or social media sites that you will reach out to each day. Then set aside time each day to connect with those people. Either by commenting on their blog site or by posting something on their social media profile page, make a connection and soon traffic will start heading to your site.
If you aren’t sure where you need to be with your business goals, we can help. We’ll analyze where you are currently at with respect to your business goals. Then we’ll analyze your business goals to see how realistic they are. Maybe they need to be lowered a bit or maybe you actually need more of a challenge. Finally, we’ll help you determine what you need to be doing to reach your goals and ultimately increase your sales.
Marco Giunta
Latest posts by Marco Giunta (see all)
- Is Your Company Using Social Media Effectively? - January 28, 2013
- Approaching the Sales Prospect - December 19, 2012
- How To Listen EFFECTIVELY During Negotiations - December 18, 2012
