{"id":1405,"date":"2008-02-05T15:30:57","date_gmt":"2008-02-05T21:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2008\/02\/defining-the-sale\/"},"modified":"2008-02-05T15:24:59","modified_gmt":"2008-02-05T21:24:59","slug":"defining-the-sale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2008\/02\/defining-the-sale\/","title":{"rendered":"Defining The Sale"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Salesopedia.com offers an excellent article titled <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.salesopedia.com\/content\/view\/811\/10479\/\">Top Salespeople Win at the Numbers Game<\/a>.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In the last 6 months:<\/p>\n<p>1. What is the average number of prospects that you attempted to call (dials per week?)<\/p>\n<p>2. What percentage of those dials resulted in contact with a decision maker (not voice mail or a gatekeeper)?<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>5. What percentage of your appointments resulted in a sale?<\/p>\n<p>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?<\/p>\n<p>7. What is your closing average per prospect? What is your closing average per appointment?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Much of successful selling is truly a numbers game.\u00a0 Skill increases productivity, but motivation drives success.\u00a0 Some days simply come down to connecting with prospects whether the salesperson feels like it or not.\u00a0 As a manager, that is the point where you may have to provide some &#8220;external motivation&#8221; to ensure that your team is putting forth the effort to maintain the metrics defined in the aforementioned questions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Salesopedia.com offers an excellent article titled Top Salespeople Win at the Numbers Game.\u00a0 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&hellip; <a class=\"read-more\" href=\"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/2008\/02\/defining-the-sale\/\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"","bgseo_description":"","bgseo_robots_index":"","bgseo_robots_follow":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[281,282,232,284,283],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5Oho-mF","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1405\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/selectmetrix.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<!-- WP Super Cache is installed but broken. The path to wp-cache-phase1.php in wp-content/advanced-cache.php must be fixed! -->