Salesopedia.com offers an excellent article titled Top Salespeople Win at the Numbers Game.  The article is a bit of a promo for a specific selling system, but the author provides a list of questions that all sales managers should retain.

In the last 6 months:

1. What is the average number of prospects that you attempted to call (dials per week?)

2. What percentage of those dials resulted in contact with a decision maker (not voice mail or a gatekeeper)?

3. Out of all the dialing you did in #1, what percentage resulted in talking to the person who could sign a contract, issue a purchase order, or cut a check? This number is crucial: This is the number of genuine prospects you contacted.

4. What percentage of those decision-maker contacts resulted in an appointment? This number is important for two reasons: 1) You need to know how many contacts it takes to secure an appointment, and 2) You need to gauge, measure, and refine your High Probability Prospecting offers.

5. What percentage of your appointments resulted in a sale?

6. What is the average number of sales appointments, per prospect, does it take for you to close a sale? Over the past 6 months, exactly how many appointments did you make, and keep?

7. What is your closing average per prospect? What is your closing average per appointment?

Much of successful selling is truly a numbers game.  Skill increases productivity, but motivation drives success.  Some days simply come down to connecting with prospects whether the salesperson feels like it or not.  As a manager, that is the point where you may have to provide some “external motivation” to ensure that your team is putting forth the effort to maintain the metrics defined in the aforementioned questions.

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