Success in business and life is a continuous journey. As with any journey, it’s important to set relevant destination points or markers along the way, to help guide you to where you want to be and when you plan to arrive. Markers also let you stop and pause for a moment to reflect on the distance that you’ve travelled so far.
Being armed with this knowledge provides you with a model – this model is the start of your sales pipeline or funnel. Use our tips below to break this down into a weekly workload. This weekly workload will then inform you how much activity you need to implement on a regular basis.
Tip 1: Don’t average out your numbers
Consider seasonal variations, annual leave commitments of key staff, months where other business commitments need to take priority such as running events or attending roadshows. You might specify 1 new customer for July, 0 new customers for August, 3 new customers for September, and 5 new customers for October.
Once you’ve defined the number of new customers you’re aiming for each month, calculate the number of meetings, phone calls and companies you need to research in that month – then break this down into a weekly target.
Tip 2: Plan your sales activity with your sales management system or customer relationship management (CRM) system
Time flies in business. Put your trust in your CRM system to help you and the team manage your plans and your numbers. For example, in Microsoft Dynamics CRM you can set goals for any period of time, and often daily, weekly and monthly goals are used to specifically plan when the numbers in the above example will be met.
The real power comes with scale, as the above model can be used with 1, 2, 5, 10 or 100 people or more on your sales team. Without the right system to help you to manage this kind of volume and level of complexity you could very quickly find yourself unable to keep track of when and where you set all the goals to be achieved.
Tip 3: Monitor actual activity and outcomes against planned goals
You’ve put a lot of work into making tips 1 and 2 meaningful to your business. Your CRM system should make it easy to track whether you’ve achieved your goals for the number of phone calls made or emails sent, meetings scheduled, and new customers secured during any specific time period. This enables you to regularly report, for example on a daily, weekly or monthly timeframe, whether you’re on track to meet your goals, whether you’ve met your goals, or whether you’ve exceeded them..
Once you’ve set off on your journey of growth, monitoring actual activity and outcomes against planned goals is key to knowing whether you’ve missed a marker.
