What You Measure Gets Done – Record Your Progress And See Increased Success
As a selling professional, I would expect you have created a simple system to record your sales activities and results. Hopefully you are recording and measuring these areas on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
- Sales to new customers
- Sales to repeat customers
- Sales presentations and closed sales (closing ratios)
- Sales to referrals vs. cold calling or walk in customers
- Other metrics of importance as discussed with your manager
Like many of you, I am not a fan of paperwork. I have learned it is necessary to help me succeed in achieving what I want in life, and so I invest my time to improve my ongoing results.
Recording your activity on a consistent basis gives you some solid metrics to evaluate and will often reveal areas that you can work on to enhance your selling abilities and results.
You can’t improve what you can’t identify.
I challenge you to invest time (5 mins a day; 30 minutes a week; an hour a month; or a day at the end of your year) evaluating your activities and your results.
I can guarantee you’ll be more in touch with the ‘reality’ and connections between your activities and results. In addition, you’ll be in a good position to make productive changes that will increase your closing ratios, earn more money, and build a better repeat and referral customers base.
Remember, what gets measured gets done. Make it a point to reward what you want to see. Treat yourself when you increase your results.
What do your activities and measurements reveal?
As you evaluate your measurements, ask yourself a few ‘honest’ questions:
- Why did your sales average increase or decrease over this period?
- Why did you lose more sales in one period versus another one?
- Why is your time to close the sales cycle increasing or decreasing?
What changes are you going to make in your selling activities and what results do you want to see?
