Presents

G.A.P. Goals

Activity

Production

A White Paper for Sales Executives and Sales Management

www.matriximpact.com – www.buildyoursalesmachine.com johnk@matriximpact.com

216-347-6729

Sell on Value Not on Price™

Summary

These 3 areas are the key to your sales team’s success. As a sales leader, you can not hope to manage, guide, coach or even communicate in a meaningful manner without knowing precisely where each of your sales people stand in these categories.

This document will take you through each of the 3 G.A.P. areas in detail, but it is up to you, the sales leader, to make it digestible to your team. One idea that may take some explanation is the logical, not linear nature of this process. Setting big picture as well as day-to-day goals, establishing tangible targets and grander scale objectives, will take your guidance to explain the importance of all of the pieces that are needed to succeed.

Lastly, this process is about transparency. Your team needs to know what you expect out of them and that they will be held them accountable. But here is the twist, you are accountable too. If you invest the time to define and describe this process to your team and they invest the time to do it, then you darn well better track and measure their attainment. Regular individual meetings with your reps to cover their goals and their achievement are a must.

Goals $ = How Much: The road map to success begins with their goals. The first goal to know about your sales people is how much money they want to make. Not “about this” or “almost that” but exactly to the PENNY how much they want to make.

The first aspect to consider is time management. No goal setting process is complete without taking TIME into consideration. It is the ultimate commodity, without it, you have nothing. The graphic to the left speaks for itself. Make sure your people understand the correlation between hours and what they get paid.

G.A.P.

Goals – Activity - Production

The second aspect of how much they want to make is what they do with their time. We always want our salespeople to be able to answer these 2 questions…

• Are you valuing your time at the level of money you want to make? • If not who will?

$75,000 = Are you working like someone who makes $75,000 a year – someone who makes roughly $37 every sales hour of the day?

$100,000 = Are you working like someone who makes $100,000 a year – someone who makes roughly $50 every sales hour of the day (almost a dollar a minute)?

$120,000 = Are you working like someone who makes $120,000 a year – someone who makes roughly $60 every sales hour of the day (or a dollar a minute)?

$150,000 = Are you working like someone who makes $150,000 a year – someone who makes roughly $75 every sales hour of the day (or over a dollar a minute)?

$200,000 = Are you working like someone who makes $200,000 a year – someone who makes roughly $100 every sales hour of the day?

$250,000 = Are you working like someone who makes $250,000 a year – someone who makes roughly $125 every sales hour of the day (or two dollars a minute)? I could keep going but you get the point.

It boils down to doing what is most important to achieve your goals at all times. To our right is a friend of ours, his name is URGENT and he is a member of the Best Practice League™. His superpower is to remind us of that very thing. Always be moving forward; always be doing what is most important. If we don’t we will get caught in the minutia that will clog our schedule and can KILL our productivity. With such a limited number of true selling hours each day, your time needs to be invested with people who should, can, and will, either buy your offering or help you progress the sale. A moment with anyone else is a time management tragedy.

Big Picture Goals

Part of your job as Sales Leader is to know the answer to the following questions; What are their dreams? What are their financial goals for the next 5 years? What kind of car would they have if they could? Where is their dream vacation spot? What kind of house do they want? What type of renovations do they want to do in their current house? When do they want to be able to retire comfortably? Do they want to be “snowbirds” and live south or west in the winter and come back north and east in the summer?

There are, of course, many more potential questions, but the point is your team needs to have something BIGGER than just “make the 20 calls a day” as their goal. There has to be a pot-o-gold at the end of rainbow, something that is more than just the work, something that is the goal of accomplishing the work. Without this, work or the job has minimal meaning. It is your responsibility to know what these goals are, then help to achieve them. The nice by-product is if they achieve their goals you will achieve your goals.

Activity

Success in sales can be boiled down to simple mathematics, X prospecting pieces leads to Y appointments leads to Z sales. But just like in math, much is dependent on having the correct numbers and proper formula to use. Below is a list of potential areas of activity to base goals and measure.

• Number of prospecting touches mailed/emailed/dropped-off • Number of outbound prospecting calls (dials or in-person) for new business • Number of outbound prospecting calls (dials or in-person) for business from

existing customers • Number of discoveries conducted (initial sales meetings) number of

presentations given • Number of informational touch pieces mailed/emailed/dropped-off during the

course of the selling cycle • Number of proposals generated and presented

• Number of referrals obtained • Number of trade shows and/ or events (selling oportunities) attended • The conversion/success rates for all of the above

I can’t tell you what is most important for YOU to goal, measure and track; everybody’s business and market is so varied and different. I can tell you that what you choose to measure and track better be what is most important to success in your business.

The BIG 4 in my book are: Prospecting Touches, Calls, Discoveries, and Presentations. Everything flows from these 4 activities. If enough touches are not sent out you can’t make enough calls, not enough calls means not enough discoveries etc…

It is also VERY important to know conversion rates, how many to how many. The conversion metric tells you what you need to do and in what volume.

Conversion Metric Example: A low conversion rate of calls to appointments means either they are targeting the wrong people, sending out poor prospecting touches, not sending out enough touches or need help with their phone skills. Any of these ailments are deadly to creating new sales and must be addressed immediately.

There are some peripheral activity goal targets that can impact your team’s development. The weight you give these is completely dependent on the maturity and development of your sales team. A younger sales team, the peripheral activities are crucial, a team of seasoned vets not as much. A mix of experience would depend on your team dynamics and so on. Below is a list of some of those activities.

Only you as sales leader can decide what the most important activities or K.P.I. (Key Performance Indicators) are and what should be considered in a sales person’s goals. Don’t worry though; Matrix has more than a few examples that will help you in your decision process.

• Reading of industry or professional books • Listening to developmental audio, watching video material, listened

to or viewed classes or seminars/webinars • Submitting product or service ideas • Making improvement suggestions and providing their solutions • Participating in company activities outside the sales role (e.g.

strategy sessions, writing an internal newsletter, etc.) • Mentoring younger, inexperienced sales reps

Production Where the rubber meets the road, all the activity in the world does not matter if you do not put numbers on the board. Not dissimilar from activity, a big part of this metric is in knowing the right productivity numbers. The Rosetta stone of these statistics is the A.U.S.P. (Average Unit Selling Price). It tells us how much of virtually everything we need to achieve our goals.

A.U.S.P. Example: Your goal is $1,000,000,000 this year in sales. You’re A.U.S.P. is $10,000. That means your goal needs to be minimally 100 sales this year. 100 sales this year means you need to go on X discoveries, make Y calls and send Z

prospecting touches.

There are other key measurements as well to the left of our favorite species of tree.

This is a rare case when I believe that EACH of these metrics is crucial to know. Goals must be set and tracked for each of these results. The beauty is we can backward engineer training and coaching all the way to corresponding/correlating activity through these outcome’s correct interpretation.

• A.U.S.P. = average unit selling price (what either the average or sale or average customer is worth to you in dollars)

• Total sales revenue generated • Number of units sold • Number of actual closed deals • Number of new customers • Number of added on sales • Growth (percentage) of each figure

This is where our friend Coach of the Best Practice League™ comes in. His superpower of experience and judgment allows him to determine what the results mean and most importantly what action is needed based on the results. Always quick with either carrot, stick or more training,Coach always balances his reaction based on the situation and the individual sales person.

Caveats Now that we have defined our Goals, Activity and Production we need to set some basic rules in terms of setting your targets and measurement processes. Some of these are sales person specific and some will need your guidance as sales leader but they are all critical to the success of the process.

First the “Do’s…

• Continually qualifying all suspects, prospects and customers is the best way to make sure you’re investing sales time wisely.

• Enthusiasm and confidence are generally at their highest after winning new business. Enjoy the moment (but only for a moment), and then let success fuel your next sales contacts immediately. In fact, consider using it to help you through one of your most difficult current sales efforts.

• Every day is 20% of your sales week; understand the importance of every day, hour and opportunity.

• Every month invest 30 minutes in yourself and step through a self-assessment as a private check on your value and progress as a sales professional. Forget the fluff and examine yourself as your manager might (or ultimately will). Make self-evaluation a consistent part of your sales discipline and you are guaranteed to have better results

Now some “Don’ts”…

• Talking with people who can't move the sales process along. A TRUE sales day is made up of contact with real people who can buy your product or can help you sell your product.

• Unnecessary research activities; what’s too much? There's really no definitive answer, it's particular to your sales world. Many people start to get a gut feel for when they should move on. The key is to act on it and make the call (rather than making sure every little thing is known before the call – fine line, of course). You might be surprised what you can learn by asking a straightforward question of the person who answers the phone or responds to an email.

• "Crafting" or "drafting" a script, email, worksheet/form or letter • Designing a “new” process to streamline other daily activities

That’s it folks. Now the hard work starts, the DOING! And remember you can either make sales or make excuses but

you can’t do both!