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Whether you recognize it or understand it, you have a success formula. Everyone does. Every business, every athlete, and every salesperson have a recipe or formula that leads to success. In sales, it is the various activities that are required to create a new customer.

When I first started in door-to-door selling, I tracked the number of homeowners that I began a conversation with at the door. I began to see a pattern emerge that led me to believe that for every 13 homeowners I could speak with, 1 would become my customer. That became my success formula.

Consider the unit of work that you must do to make a sale. It involves prospecting activities, an initial contact, needs analysis, an offer, and a close that results in agreement and purchase. Over time, if you pay attention, you will notice that the ratio of each will begin to show a pattern. Recognizing that pattern allows you to do several things.

First, it gives you confidence. When you know that the law of averages will hold true over the course of a month, you are able to weather a bad day or a bad week. If you don’t realize there is a pattern, sales feels like a risky career choice.

Second, your formula is crucial to planning and making commitments. When the boss asks you for your sales goals, you can back those with a plan based on your understanding of your historic averages. Unlike many salespeople, your goals and commitments are based on facts and delivered with confidence.

Third, you can improve your craft by trying new tactics or deploying new ideas, knowing clearly if they are improving your formula or not. If you don’t currently know your formula, it’s not always easy to know if these modifications are delivering the desired outcome.

Here are three suggestions for identifying your formula.

Start by deciding which activities have the most impact on producing new sales. I suggest initial contacts, presentations given, and sales closed. You may feel there are other activities that are more important or that should be included. Whatever you do, start simple. No more than 3 to 4 activities.

Find an easy-to-use method or tool for tracking these activities throughout the day. Today there are many phone apps that are ideal for this purpose. Chart these activities every day for 30 days. At the end of that time, total the activities and divide by the number of sales. This is your initial success formula.

Find a coach or mentor that you can meet with once a month to go over your current success formula and how it is trending from month-to-month. Providing this type of data to a coach or mentor will allow them to make suggestions that will be helpful for improvement. You are giving them information that enables them to be accurate in their coaching.

Identifying and utilizing your success formula will give you many advantages in your sales career. One of the most important is that it removes the emotion that comes with the ups and downs that are inevitable in sales. When you know, and trust, your success formula, you will have the confidence to keep moving forward even when results are down.