Sales jobs taking the time to keep accurate records

For people in sales jobs, keeping accurate records of your customer contacts is a hugely underestimated tool in sales jobs. I think there are a number of factors which may drive poor record keeping. Firstly, sales people would rather talk than write. Given the alternatives of writing about your last call, or starting the next call which could directly lead to the next sales, there is no contest!

This leads me on nicely to my next reason as to why records can be poor in sales jobs is pressure. Naturally, people in sales jobs are put under a degree of pressure to produce sales results. A careful mix of targets and bonus opportunity driving sales people to achieve more and more can work really well. But, it can also lead to people in sales jobs living very much in the ‘here and now’. By that I mean their focus is simply on meeting their next target and not beyond, whether it be a weekly, monthly or quarterly target. This can lead to a focus on things which only have short term impact, and a neglect for activities which may offer a medium or long term yield.

Here’s an example from my own experience. My first job was selling insurance. We had weekly targets, tough weekly targets. Looking back, it was almost impossible to hit it week in week out, but what did happen is that about once a month I would cream it by enough to make up the deficit in the other weeks. This meant two things a) broadly speaking I was producing enough b) 75% of the time I always felt I wasn’t so was frantically trying to produce more. The problem was, the target was so short term, weekly, that I couldn’t see past the end of my nose.

With the benefit of hindsight I can now see the massive opportunity missed in every call to make my job easier. For every customer I saw, even if they weren’t ready to buy there and then, they all had a basket of renewal dates, at which time they would likely need to make a buying decision, whether it be car insurance renewal or the end of an endowment. I was so blinded by the need to hit this weeks target, I wasn’t interested in investing time in future events, I needed buying decisions now, otherwise there would be no future events!!

In reality, I did continue to survive and found enough people to buy to hit targets. But had I been just that little bit more thorough in recording my customer contacts, my job would have become a whole lot easier as time went by.

This analogy probably has many parallels in your market. As we have discussed in other articles, good sales is rarely about finding people with no need to buy and persuading them to part with their hard earned cash, it’s about identifying people who have made a decision to buy, and persuading them to take your particular choice of product or service. As sales people, we so often see our prospecting, for example cold calling, as simply fishing for people who have made a buying decision in order to sell to them. This is the proverbial numbers game that so many people can’t put up with.

Consider the following. You are cold calling companies to sell photocopiers, out of 100 companies how many are likely to have made a decision to buy imminently? The answer to this is probably one or two, but not very many. Beyond this you will compete with other companies for 1 or 2 chances to sell.

Now return to the same 100 companies. The average copier lasts around 5 years. How many of them will make a decision to buy within the next 2 years? Well my maths tells me this should be about 40% based on a 5 year life span, that’s 40 companies! And of course, ALL 100 are statistically likely to need to buy at some point over the five years. Lets suppose all cases you ask questions to guess when they will be ready to consider new machines in order to have the opportunity to quote. They may have a lease with a finite end date, or you may guess based upon a 5 year life span. Then you record these dates as phone calls in the future. Obviously out of these future calls, not all will have made a decision to buy, however, logically, a substantial number will be very much more likely to entertain a real selling encounter, certainly a ’luke warm’ phone call not a cold call.

To return to the original premise of calling 100 companies in a day, but now trying to ascertain a future ‘warm’ calling date over the next 5 years, you could be building up a schedule of 500 future ‘warm’ phone calls in just one week. Although this could be up to 5 years in advance, these will soon build up into regular occurrences until the actual number of completely ‘cold calls’ required is negligible.

I can confirm this as good strategy now as a buyer myself. For virtually every cold call I get, whether it is mobile phones through to equipment or insurance, I will be in the market to buy at some stage in the future and if asked the right questions will usually be able to say when that will be. If someone rings in January about mobile phones and our contracts is until August, I will not want to entertain a sales call at that time. However, I will be able to reveal the contract ends in August, at which time I will want to waste as little time ass possible scouting for quotes, so will be happy to take a call at this point.

With good CRM systems in use (customer relationship management systems) in most sales jobs,some companies are now latching on to this, always looking to record the end of your contract dates. Consider your own markets. The chances are, pretty much everyone you talk too will be making a buying decision in your market at ‘some’ point in the future. A few sensible questions can quickly determine when this will be, record a call in your calendar. Do this on a regular basis, and cold calls will become a thing of the past and see your sales soar.

Good luck.