Sales is a numbers game

Welcome to my sales blog, this blog is intended to share my thoughts and ideas on business to business sales. I’m new to blogging and writing content for the internet in general so please bear with me as I refine my skills. Being a pure sales hunter I am of course perfectly confident in my ability to master these skills and sell you on my own writing style. My experiences have been learnt at the coal face of sales under market conditions from established market leaders to new start up’s and the development of my own enterprises. As with every faucet of the market each of the positions have been based in highly competitive markets where the difference between taking an order and making a sale are huge. From riding the last boom to surviving through the recession I have seen a lot of different sales theories put in place and have had to quickly adapt my own skill set to keep pace with these changing demands.

 

I’m going to start my blog with what I view as the most important aspect of sales; at the risk of sounding cheesy sales is a numbers game plain and simple. The more prospects you see the more money you make. I started my sales career selling cinema advertising an industry which is all about hitting the numbers, with little in the way of inbound leads we had to rely on cold calling to fill our pipelines and get sales in. The numbers were quite easy to work 5 cold calls would yield 1 appointment with a qualified prospect.  1 out of 4 appointments would lead to sale with an average of 3 sales per week needed to hit the company targets one needed to fill there week with 12 appointments to get the job done. 60 calls per week and 12 appointments was therefore the biggest factor in getting to target a pure numbers game.

 

Being young and fresh out of university this all seemed to easy do the numbers and the results came. Being prior to the popularity of the internet and complex CRM systems there were less choices to finding prospects so it came down to the sales persons best friend the good old yellow pages or parking up and knocking on every door in business and industrial zones. With a high level of motivation and wanting to excel this simple numbers game worked fine. Of course I can hear the choruses of I could close better than that or get a better hit rate for appointments but I can tell you now it was a simple numbers game you made the calls saw the clients and the results came.