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Fanatical Prospecting — Chapter-06: Know Your Numbers: Managing Your Ratios
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6 Know Your Numbers Managing Your Ratios Everything around you is mathematics. Everything around you is numbers. —Shakuntala Devi There are people who will tell you that sales is not a numbers game. This statement is often followed with “That’s old-school thinking” or something I heard more recently, “Thinking of sales as a numbers game is stupid.” Well, being stupid is stupid. Sales is and always has been governed by numbers because, in sales, the formula for success is a simple mathematical formula: What (quality) you put into the pipe and how much (quantity) determines what you get out of the pipe. Numbers, or the “how much,” are the science of sales. The “what”—the size of the prospects, the quality of the prospects, the qualification level of the prospects, the depth of your penetration 36
and relationships with decisions makers, influencers, and coaches— that is a little bit of science and art. Elite Athletes Know Their Numbers Take a moment and think of your favorite professional athlete. If we were to walk up to that person and ask them to tell us about their latest stats, what do you think the probability is that they’d be able to recite a litany of detailed statistics on their performance? I’ll guarantee it would be 100 percent. I know this because elite athletes know their numbers. They know their numbers because their entire focus as competitors is reaching peak performance. Knowing their numbers gives them the data they need to evaluate how they are doing at any given time and most importantly, to make adjustments. It is no different in sales. Elite salespeople, like elite athletes, track everything. You will never reach peak performance until you know your numbers and use those numbers to make directional corrections. At any given moment, you should know how many calls, contacts, e-mails, responses, appointments, and sales you have made. You should track social prospecting activity on sites like LinkedIn, text messages sent, and even smoke signals (if that is relevant). You should measure how many new prospects or new information points you’ve gathered about existing prospects that you’ve added to your database. Once you are tracking your numbers consistently, the door is opened to an honest assessment of both the efficiency and the effectiveness of your sales activities. ■ Efficiency is how much activity you are generating in the time block allotted for a particular prospecting activity. ■ Effectiveness is the ratio between the activity and the outcome. Know Your Numbers 37
Your drive is to optimize the balance between the two and maximize the outcome. Efficiency + Effectiveness = Performance E E P For example, you could be highly efficient in making pros- pecting calls on the phone. You are able to crush it and make 100 dials in an hour. But if those 100 dials result in no new informa- tion, no appointments, or appointments with low potential pros- pects (LPPs), then you were not effective and essentially wasted your time. Conversely, you could make 10 calls in the same period, setting one appointment with a highly qualified prospect and updating two records in your database. You would be more effective than the previous scenario but extremely inefficient because you wasted a ton of time and suboptimized your phone block. Without a doubt, there are dozens of variables that drive efficiency and effectiveness for every potential prospecting channel. Those variables include the quality of the list you are working from, industry vertical, time of day, time of year, day of week, decision- maker role of your contact, product or service, complex sale versus transactional, call objective, prospecting channel, quality of your approach, methodology, message, confidence, your mindset, and much more. Once you know your numbers, you also gain the power to consider these variables objectively. With that information you’ll make small adjustments that can increase or even double your sales. This is why you must gather the courage and self-discipline to track, analyze, and make regular adjustments based on your pros- pecting performance stats. Keeping count keeps you grounded in reality and focused on your daily goal. It ensures that you remain honest with yourself about where you really stand against your targets and what you need to do or sacrifice to get back on track if you are missing your number. 38 Fanatical Prospecting
You Cannot Be Delusional and Successful at the Same Time Last summer I walked into my office after getting back from an appointment. It was midafternoon as I strolled into the sales bullpen to check the temperature of our sales team. I stopped and asked one of my reps how the day was going. He shook his head and whined, “It’s awful. No one is pulling the trigger today. I don’t know what’s going on out there, but I’m hitting a brick wall on every call.” “Well, that’s not good,” I said. “Tell me how many calls you’ve made today.” He rolled his eyes and shook his head. “A lot! And I’m getting nowhere!” “Help me understand,” I responded. “When you say ‘a lot,’ what do you mean?” He grimaced like he was in pain. “Well, I don’t know exactly. I’m guessing it’s easily 50 calls so far today. You don’t understand, Jeb. Something has changed out there. Nobody wants to do anything.” “Okay, let me see your tracking sheet.” I looked down at his desk, searching for the sheet we use at our office to visually track daily stats. He stared blankly at his screen for a moment to gather his thoughts and then responded, “Oh, I forgot to use the tracking sheet today. I’ve been so busy it just slipped my mind. But I’m tracking my calls in SalesForce.” “All right then, let’s go in and take a look at each of your calls and see if we can find a pattern.” I had him walk me through each of the calls he’d made that day, and while we were doing that checked the call log on our phone system. As we walked through calls and I asked questions, he became more and more aware of just how few calls he’d made that day. When we finished our conversation the final tally was 12. Know Your Numbers 39
Twelve calls over a seven-hour period. Completely inefficient and a big question mark about what he’d been doing with this time. At the conclusion of our short coaching session, he said that it felt like he had made far more calls than he actually had. Because he hadn’t been visually tracking his activity, he had no idea where he stood. In retrospect, he was derailed early in the day after two prospects rejected him harshly. That tripped up his confidence and shifted his mindset. It happens to the best of us. Here’s where he made his mistake though: Because he failed to track his activity (basically allowing the system to do it for him), he had no visibility into what was actually happening with his prospecting activity. With his emotions reeling, he lost touch with reality and deluded himself into believing that he was being productive. One of the commonalities that I observe among top salespeople and fanatical prospectors across all market segments—inside and outside—is manual tracking of activity. They each have their own style and means of tracking their numbers, but the one thing they all know is exactly where they stand. The majority of salespeople don’t track their numbers. Why? Because it is so much easier to delude themselves into thinking that they have made far more calls or prospecting touches than they have really made. The false comfort of delusion is warm and fuzzy and far more inviting than the cold edge of reality. When you choose delusion over reality, you are making a conscious choice to not only lie to yourself but to lower your standards and performance. Reality is the realm of superstars, and joining reality is one of the first steps you’ll need to take on the road to developing a fanatical prospecting mindset. 40 Fanatical Prospecting