The summer I turned 18, I spent as much time as possible at my sister’s cabin, an isolated homestead deep in the woods of Northern Ontario. And I often brought along a friend to enjoy the canoeing, reading, swimming and hiking. One friend came prepared for the possibility of rainy days, with a board game I’d never played before – Mastermind. I embraced the beauty of its logic instantly. It never did rain that weekend, but we sat outside on the tiny porch and played game, after game, after game. In fact, I’ve never stopped playing. It’s on my phone and iPad, and I even played a game on my desktop before starting to write this post.
Why am I sharing this with you? Because logic is an important part of owning a business and/or having a sales career. As we enter the 26th week of 2016, the halfway mark, it is time for you to embrace this beautiful logic.
You need to take a very close look at your numbers this week. Are you on track to make or exceed your sales goals for 2016? Or have you gotten distracted somehow? You need to know. The answer is logical; it’s in your numbers.
Here’s a very quick exercise to get you some of the data you need:
1. How much revenue have you generated (and invoiced) up to June 30?
2. Subtract this number from the revenue you want to generate this year. Whatever the answer, you have 26 weeks left to make it happen.
3. How many individual clients have you invoiced so far this year?
4. Take this number and divide it into your invoiced revenue on June 30 (the answer from question #1). This is your current average worth of one client.
5. Divide your average worth into the amount of revenue you still want to generate this year (the answer from question #2) and this is, roughly, the number of clients you need to close – and invoice – in the next 26 weeks.
So … how are you going to reach and close these clients? Make sure you have a clear plan in place because the last half of 2016 starts next week!
These numbers are all logical and true. They don’t carry any emotion, only facts – facts you can work with to make a substantial difference in how your business is growing. In fact, it’s incredibly valuable to track even more numbers such as: How many potential clients have you spoken with/met so far this year? How many have accepted a proposal or participated in a demonstration or agreed to a discovery meeting? How many have become clients?
These are the statistics/metrics of your sales process. Knowing them allows you, no matter how busy you become with projects for existing clients, to continually generate revenue. For example, in my business, a proposal is usually the final step of my sales process. And my current closing ratio on proposals is 75% or 3 out of 4. So as long as I continually create quality proposals, I can accurately forecast future revenue. As I write this, I have 12 proposals yet to be confirmed and I can be very confident they represent 9 new sales. While this isn’t enough to get me to my financial goal for 2016, I am definitely on track.
For more information on what numbers you should be tracking and what they mean, check out these posts:
https://cloudkettle.com/cloudkettle-year-1-by-the-numbers/
https://thephonelady.com/you-arent-making-enough-calls-to-hit-your-quota/
https://thephonelady.com/creativity-logic-and-noise/
Enjoy your phonework everyone!