Sales = Numbers Game
It is my tradition to write a blog or column at the beginning of every year to remind my readers of how important it is to set goals. Sometimes it feels redundant because all sensible businesspeople do this, right? The answer is “wrong.” A Harvard Business Study revealed 83% of the population does not have goals, 14% have a plan in mind, but are unwritten goals and 3% have goals written down. The study went on to find that the 14% who have goals are 10 times more successful than those without goals. The 3% with written goals are 3 times more successful than the 14% with unwritten goals. That said, seems like a good reason to write down your goals.
I learned about goal setting at age 17 when I began working for a general agent of an insurance company the week after my high school graduation. I was hired as his Gal Friday worked there for nine and a half years. During that time, my title changed to Secretary and then Administrative Assistant. With each promotion came a bump in pay and a heap of new responsibilities. And along the way, I picked up on what it takes to be successful in sales.
My boss, Ray Schmidtke, was a military veteran complete with a Marine tattoo on his forearm. He was a competitor and had an opportunity to try out for the Chicago Cubs. He was a good man with a nice family. And he cared deeply about the people he hired to be on his team. I remember wondering why he hired me rather than someone with experience. I know now it was because Ray liked to develop people, perhaps he saw something in me that I had yet to see in myself. He was extremely proud when I went on to have a successful sales career and open my own recyling company.
When he hired me, he passed on experience and instead put up with a teenager. Making a long story short, in my nine years with him, he turned me into a businessperson. He put it in my goals to attend community college in the evenings knowing that I often did my homework while I was supposed to be doing my job. And he scheduled goal setting sessions where I created both personal and professional goals, wrote them down and reviewed them quarterly, together.
I still depend on his wisdom and am grateful I was fortunate enough to be a recipient of the compassion for those who worked on his team and his process of measuring sales success. He would say, “It’s a numbers game.”
When I started with the company, the sales team was comprised of men, but Ray was progressive, and he hired the first person of color to work for the company and a woman who both turned out to be excellent salespeople. He trained the new hires himself. One of the guys he trained went on to be a Senior Vice President of the entire company after moving up the company ladder, goal after goal. Ray had passed away, but I know he would have liked seeing his protégé’s goals come to fruition. In my position, I was privy to the training information because it was my job to type it up on the Selectric typewriter and used a mimeograph (some of you will have to look these up) machine to make copies. I studied the material and studied the sales team for who followed the training and who did not.
Ray was insistent that his team set goals. He followed up with monthly meetings to review their progress or lack of. As with every team, they were a cast of characters. As I saw it, the team was segmented into three categories. 1. The Successful who year after year earned a bonus and won a trip to someplace nice with their spouse. 2. The Middlemen who had a good year here and there, were never consistent, but when on the bubble were able to meet an acceptable quota. And 3. the ones who struggled until they were let go to find a job more suitable to their personalities or strengths.
My observation was that those who were struggling didn’t work as hard as those who were successful and always had excuses like service issues or something of a personal nature. The Middlemen knew how to get by with the least amount of effort without being fired. They were not consistent in applying Ray’s training. I also think they thought they were smarter than everyone elese. While I felt badly for those who struggled, I couldn't help but think that the Middlemen, with a little more effort could have been successful. For them, good enough, was good enough, their goal to stay off the radar. And the successful followed the training, were hungry for additional training and constantly did the same things daily, weekly and monthly to accomplish their goals. I knew because I kept the statistics. Ray and I counted cold calls, appointments and closed sales from their weekly sales reports and created a closing ratio report that was compiled weekly and monthly. It was evident to me that the people making the most cold calls, scheduled more appointments and closed more sales. It was also evident that when reps lied about their amount of weekly cold calls, they foolishly made themselves look worse. For example, an inflated number of cold calls to make it look like they were working also made them look like they had a pretty crappy cold calling or appointment setting methodology. If you made 150 cold calls in a week and only set up one appointment and closed zero sales, one looks ineffective compared to the team member who makes 50 calls, schedules 8 appointments and closes 3 sales.
For 2021, I won’t rant about setting a long list of goals but instead ask you to set one goal. Contact 100 people per week using all mediums, phone, email, video meetings, text message, SMS message, video message, social media platforms and maybe someday we will even be back to face to face. Mix it up, 20 by phone, 20 using social media, and so on. If you do that, you will see an increase in appointments and your closing ratio will increase. I am confident that the successful will embrace this goal, write it down and figure out how they will get it done. The rest, not so much because good enough is good enough. It’s a numbers game. It’s always been a numbers game. And results don’t lie.
