Manage your sales

Sales Managers all over the country are trying day in and day out to manage and control the sales of their sales teams. At weekly and monthly sales training meetings managers are asking their sales agents to predict how many sales they will achieve etc. However on sales training courses new sales people are being told that you can not control sales

The truth is that no one can control sales, you see a sale is not really a sale until it is done, which means a sale is past tense, but yet Managers still insist on talking about the commitment to a sales target for the forthcoming week or month.

What sales training courses cover is the importance of activity. In other words the number of new prospects the sales person will contact with a view to selling. If managers focused on managing the number of prospects a salesperson was going to speak with this week, they would have a far clearer indication to the level of sales the sales person will probably achieve.

Contrary to popular belief Sales is a numbers game at least in part. Don’t get me wrong I accept there is a lot more to sales than only understanding and working the numbers but it is a good start for any new salesperson to understand their key ratios when it comes to selling.

The key ratios will change for each salesperson and also for each specific industry, but in simple terms the numbers salespeople need to understand are things such as:

How many calls have I made?

How many appointments did that generate?

How many sales did I achieve from them appointments?

For a minute let’s assume a salesperson made 10 calls which led to 3 appointments and then from the three appointments generated 1 sale. The best chance the salesperson has of achieving 3 sales is to make sure they make 30 calls. In sales training courses salespeople are taught the key ratios they need to be aware of, so as they know the activity needed to achieve the sales result they need.

The sales managers need to start managing the activity as opposed to keep trying to manage sales. You can control activity but you can not control sales.

Understanding numbers and key ratios of calls to sales are easily taught through a good sales training course.