Under optimal salespeople. This module is about tracking your sales activity. It's really important because it's one of the basic building blocks for growth. And if you are actually able to implement this into your into your daily activity, then you will have a quantum leap in your in your sales effectiveness and in your bank account. First, I want to go over a couple basic management concepts. The first one is that you can only manage what you can control, right?

You can't manage things that you don't control, you can only track or monitor them. Now in sales, the only thing we can actually control are, what we say and what we do. We can't control the actual sales. Okay, the second thing I want to talk about is that is about tracking your your your sales activity and why it's really important how it can help you The first thing is it will help you to diagnose problems you're having in sales. If you have no data you don't know how many people you talk to. You don't know You know how many how many sales conversations you've had?

And you're not, and you're not being effective in sales? You don't know where to start, you know, the only thing you know is you didn't sell anything, right? You don't know where the problem is. Whereas if we, if we track how many times we dial the phone and how many times we actually get to talk to people, and we find out that that ratio is too low, we might know that you have to work on what you say, to get by gatekeepers. If you're talking to plenty of people, but you can't get any appointments booked. You know, we know we have to focus on that area.

The second reason why it's so important is that when you know just think about it in sports, you play harder when you keep score, no matter whether you're playing tennis or basketball or any kind of any kind of sport. If you keep score, you play harder. If you're playing tennis and the ball goes wide, and you don't you know you're you're not keeping score, you'll just let it go and pick out another ball and hit it back to your partner. But if you're playing your best buddy, you know and you can keeping score you know in the balls a little while you'll stretch out and and try your hardest to return to the return of the shot. So when we're keeping track of how many calls we're doing, you're gonna play harder. The second reason you want to third reason you want to do this is because keeping track of this stuff will keep you out of slumps, right?

When you know when your sponsor won't be able to sneak up on you. Because if you're looking at the data every day, you can tell when you're not when your call volume drops, and you can adjust before it's too long. If you're not keeping track the first time you're going to notice it is when your sales go down. The data will help you the next time you go to set goals. So if you have if you know what your closing ratio is and what's your conversion ratio from one stage to the next. When you go to set your goals next year will be much easier to figure out how much selling activity you need to do in order to reach those goals.

And keeping track of your sales activity will help you get out of your comfort zone. Which is vital if you're going to have this quantum leap. So, for all those reasons, it's really, really important that you track your activity. Okay, before you get around to tracking your activity, you know there's a need to have a vision for your life in your dream for yourself, why am I doing this right? Why am I working? What am I trying?

What am I trying to accomplish here? Now we have a whole nother module on how to do that. It's called goal setting in the in the hidden weakness is part four of entitled The hidden weaknesses. Okay, FPS if you if you've established your vision in your dream, the next thing you want to do is set goals and goals are what you're trying to accomplish in any specific time period. So, you know, what, what am I trying to get done this particular year? And there's a you know, again, this is another module you'll you can go through on exactly how to set those goals and then you Have to create the sales activity plan in the sales activity plan is, what exactly do I do on a day to day week to week basis in order to achieve those goals?

What sales activity Do I have to perform? So the kinds of things that are going to be in that sales activity plan are things like the number of you know, the number of attempts that I'm going to make attempt is either you walk into somebody's office or you pick up the phone and call that's an attempt, or, you know, attempts lead to conversations I may make, you know, three or four or five attempts and I finally get ahold of somebody and I can talk when I talk to somebody about my product or service. That's the count that is a conversation. You want to track first appointments. The first appointment is the first time it first of all an appointment is when you book time with somebody, they put it in their calendar to schedule time with you. A first appointment is what I usually like to track because what I believe is once you turn Round up an opportunity in all diligence, salespeople will, will do whatever they have to do to close that sale.

They'll have multiple meetings. And we don't have any trouble with that. But the thing that's the purest measure of the activity that will lead to growing the pipeline is the number of first appointments that I'm able to book, The first appointment. Again, it's just the first time that I'm talking to a prospect, or first time I'm meeting with a prospect to talk about my particular product or service. By the way, when I say meeting these days, lots of meetings occur on the phone or with WebEx or something like that. And by the way, if it's with a customer, it's the first time I'm talking about a new project with that customer.

So okay, the qualified opportunity is one that meets the meets the Cross meets the the standards of being a qualified prospect and we have another you know, other modules that talk about that but briefly, as you know, are they you know, do they have a need? Do they have, you know, a company compelling reason to move forward? Do they have enough money? Do we understand what the decision processes? Are they focused on us? Do we have relationship with them?

And we have a lot more information on that and some other modules. Okay, qualified opportunity, at some point will will lead to us having to write a quote or a proposal. So we want to track how many proposals we do. And then of course, we want to track sales. Now, I've never run into a salesperson that didn't track how many sales they made, right, but everybody does that. And of course, some other things you might want to track or the number of referrals you get, but you don't want to track too many things.

I had one person like to track about 27 different factors are just so many factors. It gets too cumbersome and then it you know, you just won't follow through on it. Okay, so how do we track our activity? If we're talking about you personally, as a single person, how do we track Look, the simpler, the better I believe in doing it manually. I mean, you can people try to get software to do it and it just gets so cumbersome to use the software. Some people try to hook it up to their phone and the trouble is your phone in the software real usually can't determine the difference between a call to a really qualified prospect and one that's a, you know, call to your bookie or something so.

So, you know, again, I like to do it manually. I think for an individual, it doesn't take much time. I'm going to demonstrate it here for you in a second. Don't overcomplicate it, you know, if you're a corporation, most CRMs will do it. You usually have to do some programming like Salesforce Comm. I have several clients that use that if you you know, do a little bit of programming, people can check boxes when they update, update Salesforce in and you can print reports but however you do it keep track I don't care if you're doing a three by five card in the back of an envelope or a complicated spreadsheet or piece of software, whatever it is keep track of your activity on a day to day basis.

What I want to do now is demonstrate how to track this activity one of the biggest one of the biggest objections I get to, to doing is they say it takes too much time and I want to show you exactly what I'm going to do now look. If I if I dial the phone, here's how you do if I pick up the phone, I dial it and I you know, and I don't get through to somebody I get a you know, I get a voicemail or I get a gatekeeper that won't let me through. I get credit for a for an attempt, but I don't get credit for anything else. If I pick up the phone and dial it, I get through the gatekeeper and I talk to somebody who I was trying to get whether they turn out to be Oh, it can be the most lame conversation on in the history of sales or it can be with the working person who you thought was a decision maker turns out to be nobody Doesn't matter, you know, we're not talking quality here, we're just talking quantity, I just want to know how many they are now, if everybody ever talked to is like that, we'll figure that out in the diagnosis phase here, right?

So when I made that dial and got through, I get a credit for dial and for an attempt and a conversation with the person, they have a conversation and they say, you know, we're really not interested. Okay, fine. I'm gonna pick up the phone and dial it again. I get through to a another decision maker, like do my cold calling routine, which we have other modules on. But I say, Hey, are you interested in buying some of my product? That's not the approved cold calling method, but I say, Hey, are you interested in buying something?

And they say? Yeah, actually, we are one. Why don't we get together next week and we booked an appointment with that person, and it's the first time we've talked to them about our product. Now I get credit for an attempt for a conversation and for a uniform first question. But maybe later today I'm working on getting a proposal out the door, right, I finish it and send it when I push the send button on my email or I put it in the, in the mailbox, you know, that counts as a proposal sent. You know, a qualified opportunity will generally happen when, when, when, when the opportunity matures to the point where I have uncovered all the elements that that cause it to be a qualified opportunity.

When that happens, I just give myself credit. So what I want to do for you right now is demonstrate how to keep track and show you that it really doesn't take very much time. So here I am, I'm in my office, and I'm making a phone call talking to the person you know, I get through here I turns out I was the gatekeeper I didn't get through. So I just mark my sheet. Okay. That's it took about a half a second.

Dial again I get through I talked for a while to somebody but it's not it's not very doesn't look very promising they don't invite me in for an appointment. So I get credit for I just smoke cheat again, I keep dialing, right talk some more person is is interested in, in meeting with me, you know so maybe I booked the appointment here my computer, you know put that in. And when I'm done with that I come back over here for for an attempt to conversation and appointment book and that's how it goes. At the end of the week. I've got all these little hot truck tick marks in my in my book and if you're using a spreadsheet that comes with this program, it'll add it all up for you. When you actually with the spreadsheet that comes with this program, you use it as a you print it out, you can use it as a device to just use it to track put the little tick marks and at the end of the week, you just go into the spreadsheet Put it in, boom, it adds everything up for you.

It keeps track of it day by day, week by week in various tabs, I think it's pretty obvious how to use a spreadsheet. So if you notice this does not take very much time. It's not very complicated. And we have plenty of information that with which to advance our sales career so you just have to do it right Some people believe that an hour You know, a minute spent tracking is minute better spent making a call. The problem is they don't track and they don't make the call. But you can see I mean, how many extra calls Am I going to be able to make it by just eliminate all the tracking?

Not very much. People have plenty of excuses about software not working but their pen not working. You know, I've heard thousands of excuses of why they can't do it. They don't have time to do it. They're driving in their car when they make a call. Okay, fine.

You're driving in your car when you make a call then recorded when you get someplace where you Right. here's here's an axiom I live by. And that is, if you're not tracking it, you're just not doing it. I mean, you, you can fool yourself into thinking that you're working. Okay? Your brain just can't keep track of how many calls you made over the last, you know, three months, and we'll never see trends right now, you know, you might think, Well, I know I haven't made any calls in the last day or two.

But you don't know. If you're making almost the right amount of calls every day, you won't see that, that it's gradually decreased over time. My belief is you're all working very hard. Right? The problem is that you you've got to make sure that you're working hard doing the right things, you know, you get distracted doing proposals and two, three weeks goes by and you didn't make any calls. Guess what happens?

Right? pipeline gets weak. I had a woman one time said it was right, right before, right right around Thanksgiving. She said, I'm not you know, I'm not gonna be able to track Anything over the next over the next month because, you know, I'm she was working for the government not working with her client was the government and they had a big proposal it was due. And she said, I'm just not going to have any time to do it. And I just told her I wasn't accepting that now I'm just a consultant.

I said, I'm not accepting that excuse. So what do you mean, you're not accepting? And I said, How much time does it take the track? Hardly any. I said, if you how many conversations were you supposed to have in the next three or four weeks? And she said, about 10?

I said, How long does each one of those conversations supposed to last? She said about 1015 minutes, Max? I said, Okay, that's about 150 minutes over four weeks. Right? What what's the 40 minutes a week? So I have like a half an hour a week.

I said you can't tell me you don't have a half an hour a week. Right? I said and if you don't do this next four weeks, you're gonna wake up in January, nobody to talk to so I didn't like she said, okay, you know, you're right. And she did it and get Winter, you know, she was able to maintain that her level of activity so what what I want to impress upon you is just do it track your activity I beg you to please do it like I get like I've actually got on my knees and clients offices and beg them to do it. And and sometimes that's successful sometimes it's not sometimes I'm used to by force, you know, trying to smack him in the head literally of course but, but I whatever you can do to make yourself do it. I promise you that you will have a quantum leap.