Sales Tracking – If It Is Not Measurable, It Is Not Manageable
“Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.” – Jack Welch
– U.S. Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year & Las Vegas Motivational Speaker – Clay Clark
It is absolutely critical that you and your team know where each and every inquiry source comes from! It is important for you to know how many calls your sales team is making per day! It is important for you to know with 100% certainty how many meaningful conversations your sales team is having each day. It is important for you to know how many appointments your sales team is setting up each day. It is SUPER IMPORTANT for you to know what your team’s appointment to closed deals ratio is. It is unbelievably important for you to know what each sales person’s average “ticket price” or “sales price” is. Which one of your sales people is the best? Which salesperson needs to most training? What marketing pieces work and what marketing pieces do not? Which mailers are effective and which are not? Is your Google AdWords program generating you money or costing you money? You must track all of the details related to each and every sale, and prospective sale for your organization if you are going to effectively manage it.
If you want to guarantee continual mediocrity, then don’t worry about tracking. If you want to improve your team you must be able to face the reality as it truly is. You must be able to confront the good and bad realities you face so that you can make the necessary plans to take your company to the next level. Trust me on this. Before I got wise and began to study and implement the genius of sales gurus like Jerry Vass, Chet Holmes, Shane Harwell and others I was continually managing by guess work. I would spend an entire afternoon working with a sales guy on prospecting when he in fact had no problem prospecting. He needed a ton of work on how to convert and appointment into a “booked deal”, but I never talked or trained about that because I didn’t know my numbers. Today, I now know the numbers to the point where I can pull a sales person aside and coach them to victory because I know specifically where they are struggling.
We cannot blame good people for not producing results in a system in which it is not possible to succeed because the training methods are wrong. If you don’t track your numbers your sales numbers will be volatile, your trainings will not address the root of most problems, and you might get a nose bleed. Take control of your life starting now, don’t wait forever to take action like I did.
It’s embarrassing to put in writing, but I did not implement the sales tracking systems until my business almost crumbled while I went on 7-day Caribbean Cruise vacation with my incredible wife and our only child at the time (Havana). Before hopping onto the cruise boat I was confident that our team would continue producing BIG RESULTS on the sales floor during my absence. However, upon returning to the DJ Connection office lair, much to my horror I was confronted with a much more harsh reality. As a team their numbers were terrible.
During the 7 days I was gone, the sales numbers had dropped by at least 50% below are weekly averages. This was unacceptable, and I wanted to rush in to fix the problem, but I didn’t know who the problem people were. I didn’t know who set bogus appointments, who didn’t set appointments, who worked hard, who didn’t work hard, whose closing percentage was high or whose closing percentage was low. As I frantically worked to discover the source of the problem , I repeatedly discovered that without tracking our team did not have true accountability. It seemed as though each guy on our team had a different person to blame or a different outside variable to attribute their lack of success to. It was then that I discovered that my lack of tracking was creating a huge lack of accountability. And this lack of accountability was causing a serious lack of productivity. My friend, Jack Welch, arguably one of America’s top CEOs of all time, once famously wrote, “Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.” If you aren’t currently tracking your sales, you must commit to the action steps needed to implement a tracking system right now. When are you going to start?
**For more information about how to implement an award-winning sales program, I highly recommend reading, “The Ultimate Sales Machine” by Chet Holmes. If you want to save yourself the read and you just want to get results now, call us up at 918-851-0102 or send us an email via our website at www.MakeYourLifeEpic.com.
Clay Clark
U.S. Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year
**For additional reading material and information about booking Clark to speak to your group or to hire him as a business consultant call our office to schedule an appointment today at 918-851-0102.
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