And yet, most companies leave it up to chance.

They hire salespeople and Business Development Managers. They assume these people already know how to do their job. And then they send them out into the wild, armed with some brochures and keep their fingers crossed that someone, somewhere will make some money. 

SALES IS MATHS, NOT MAGIC

15 years ago, we cut our teeth training solo entrepreneurs to sell – how do you train hundreds of entrepreneurs, all over the world, with only 2 consultants? 

We quickly developed a system of metrics tracking to be able to see at a glance what was happening not just in their overall pipeline (leads, sales, number of calls) – but to give us a snapshot as to what was happening on every  call – even with clients who were based in Sweden, Germany and the US. Because, you see, Sales isn’t magic. It’s just maths.

Consider this simple Case Study: John’s a B2B salesperson, calling purchase managers every day. Let’s say John has made 100 sales phone calls – these might be to set up appointments to see people face to face, or they may be direct follow up sales, depending on your sales model.

Out of the 100 calls, only 50 people answer the phone. 25 of them tell him within the first 5 minutes of the call that they’re too busy to talk to him right now and to send through an email. He does – and none of them respond or buy anything.

John comes back to you to let you know that you need to do more marketing because there’s not enough brand recognition for him to sell anything. Does this scenario sound familiar? Maybe John came back to you with feedback on your product line, your leads – any number of pieces of helpful advice.

In most organisations, this flies. Here’s what we  can tell you just from those three numbers: John is getting thrown off the phone at the start of the call because he’s not engaging enough. He isn’t building value quickly enough to get the attention of the client.

In most of these cases, there is no sales script – and on the occasion there is, what’s NOT happening is split testing of various openings to see which gets the most cut through. John needs a strong process to follow – in the form of a script and objection handling.

But John also needs training – his willingness to get off the phone and send an email is indicative of someone who is looking for a way to send emails, rather than make sales. In other words, he’s buying objections instead of selling your product.

It would also be helpful to review some recordings of the opening of John’s presentations, because there’s a high likelihood that he’s not being vocally engaging at the start of a call.

“Good Morning! This is John from XYZ Company, is now a good time to talk?” Will lead to zero conversations with anyone – it’ll get you thrown off the phone every time.

That’s a lot to glean from 3 numbers!

That’s the power of having someone who understands sales metrics on your side.