In this week's Sales Buzz:

If a sales person was struggling to hit target and their job was at risk, what actions would you recommend that they take to make selling easier and ensure that they became successful.

Many sales people don’t understand one of the basic necessities that will make sure they consistently achieve sales targets and because of this they fail. With just these two simple actions they could have found success...

Struggling Salespeople – What would you recommend

This week I’ve had a number of questions sent into the website by people in this situation in many different types of sales roles.

They know their product and have a sales pitch that sounds good.

Their results are consistently below target even though they are working long hours.

So what can they do to increase sales and keep their jobs.

With a few questions it was soon apparent that they could never hit their targets no matter how good their sales techniques.

That’s because they didn’t have enough qualified prospects at the beginning of the month to make it possible for them to achieve their target.

So how many qualified prospects do you need at the start of a month (or your sales period) to hit your target...

Sales target multiplied by Conversion rate
= Prospects needed

Let’s say that on average you convert 1 out of every 3 of the qualified sales prospects that you get the opportunity to sell your products or services to.

Then the one basic fact that many sales people just don’t grasp is; that unless you have qualified sales prospects that exceed 3 times your sales target you will not hit that target.

So if your target is measured by the financial value of your sales, then you will need prospects that have a financial value of 3 times your target.

If you normally convert 1 out of every 5 prospects that you meet with, then you will need a prospect list of 5 times the value of your target.

Whatever the units your target is measured in, that is the units that you use to measure the value of your prospect list.

If your target is to convert 10 customers a month,

And you usually convert 1 in every 3 prospects,

Then you will need 30 qualified prospects at the start of the month to make sure you will achieve your target.

Without this forward planning you are leaving your sales results to luck.

You are putting your job and your income at risk, and you are making selling as a career a lot harder than it needs to be.

Take 2 actions now to make hitting your target easy

The first action that I recommend my sales people to take is to work out their conversion rate.

Look back over the last few months and calculate how many qualified prospects you have met with, and how many you have sold to. Only include qualified prospects in your calculation. These are appointments where you had established beforehand that the buyer was in a position to buy from you.

Once you have this average conversion rate you multiply it by your sales target and you know how many prospects you need to get in front of each month.

The second action is to work on the techniques that you use to get yourself in front of qualified buyers.

If you need to increase the number of qualified prospects that you get the opportunity to sell to each month, then it makes sense to invest in having an effective way to arrange to meet with them.

Making sales appointments by telephone is one way to increase the number of qualified prospects that you get a chance to sell to in a month. To see sales training on making sales appointments go to Cold Calling Sales Appointment Training...

I'm Stephen Craine from the website Sales-Training-Sales-Tips.com

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