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.

Comments(0)

BusinessWeek.com offers the top 50 most influential headhunters in the business world.  Lee didn’t make the list so there goes his top contractual performance incentive.

I’m not sure how one determines these lists based on influence, but it seems appropriate that a huge company like Korn/Ferry would put 7 recruiters on the list.

If you are interested, you can read the list in it’s entirety here.

Now on to devise a new unattainable incentive for Lee.

Comments(0)

Salespeople, with strong skills, are always in demand in any economy.  Certainly some sales opportunities have an ebb and flow tied to the current economic conditions, but those are mainly business-to-consumer positions.  From that understanding comes a 2008 sales hiring outlook from Monster.com.

First key graph:

In 2008 as always, salespeople in nearly any industry will find work, if they’ve got the contacts, the product knowledge and the street savvy. “Any successful salesperson in any industry is able to write their own ticket,” says Brandon Gutman, director of marketing and business development for recruiter Stephen-Bradford Search in New York.

Couldn’t agree more.  As companies make difficult decisions, some strong salespeople are let go due to financial considerations.  This fact is why we do not abhor a bit of a hiring slowdown.  The slowdown puts some strong salespeople on the street who may have been much harder to recruit out of their former position.

Some of the hot niches this year:

Salespeople in hot information technology sectors can remain optimistic, despite the slow economy.

“In online advertising sales, there are more positions open than bodies to fill them,” he says.

From biotech to carbon credits to the robots that have replaced factory workers, 2008 will see the continued proliferation of complex products, creating a need for salespeople with high-level skills and special subject-matter expertise.

High-level sales skills are in demand today.  The days of shake-and-howdy, round of golf sales calls are waning.  Salespeople with the skills to navigate long sales cycles with multiple decision layers are the ones who will be in the most demand.

Comments(1)