What are the important numbers in your life? According to the medical community an LDL cholesterol level of 160 and above is too high. Financial planners say that you can withdraw 4% of your savings each year in retirement and never run out of money (assuming you saved enough during your working years). Then there is your Social Security number, your spouse’s birthday, and the pin number for your ATM card. All of these are important numbers in your life. Knowing these numbers leads to gaining benefits and avoiding losses.
There are important numbers for you in your sales career as well. Knowing these numbers leads to gaining benefits and avoiding losses. Unfortunately, too many people in the sales profession are oblivious to the important numbers. As a result, we see many people leave the profession because they either “didn’t feel cut out for it” or felt it was too risky to rely on commission sales. My opinion is, they just didn’t know their numbers.
Let’s take a quick look at your important numbers in sales.
- YOUR GOAL. I refuse to believe that people work for money. Why would they? You can’t eat dollar bills, you can’t sew them together to make clothes, and you can’t accumulate enough of them to make a decent set of furniture. What we work for is what the money will provide us with. Peace of mind, security for our family, the ability to travel, to drive a nice car, wear nice clothes, and to give away to those less fortunate. No, it’s not money that drives us. It’s what money will allow us to do. Identify what your true goals are and figure out how much money you will need to achieve them. This is the first number you will need. I recommend start with an annual income number that will allow you to achieve all of your goals over the next year.
- AVERAGE INCOME PER NEW INSTALLED CUSTOMER. If you have been selling for a while, take a look at the last 6 months of installed customers and figure out what your average income per customer is. Knowing this number allows you to quantify your goal. How many will you need over the next 12 months in order to fund your goals?
- DAILY ACTIVITY. If you knock doors to find your new customers, figure out what it takes to create one new installed customer. Keep track of the number of door pitches you give, the number of presentations, and the number of installed sales. This will create a formula that can be used to plan your daily activity based on the number of sales you need to make. No matter how you go about finding customers, you can track the activity and come up with a success formula. Convert that to a list of activities that need to be accomplished each day. Don’t manage sales, manage the activities that lead to a sale.
Knowing your numbers builds confidence that you control your destiny. Watching your numbers has the added benefit of leading to improvement. We are all naturally competitive and look to beat our best at every chance. Knowing and watching your numbers separates top performers in any field from the average players. Know your Numbers!