<h2>CHAPTER 1</h2><p><b>THE REALITY OF SELLING</p><br><p>It's the most basic</b> thing trainers tell their pupils: Sales is a numbersgame.</p><p>Well, maybe. But I don't think it's a matter of reducing it to that. Many peopledo, though. They have very specific metrics by which they're going to measureyour performance.</p><p>What these trainers are trying to do is quantify what you do every day:</p><p>• What's your call-to-prospect ratio?</p><p>• How many of your prospects are you converting to leads?</p><p>• What proportion of your sales pitches are you closing?</p><p>• How's that affecting the size of your commission?</p><p>• What dollar figures are you bringing into your company?</p><br><p>If these numbers are generally going up, trainers assume you must be doingsomething right.</p><p>I don't want to entirely discount the conventional wisdom. After all, goodnumbers in all the above categories are a good indication that you must be doingsomething right. They're part of the measure of a successful, positivesalesperson.</p><p>Above all, I want this book to approach the question of your attitude, which isa more abstract, complex issue.</p><p>Before we start on that, though, we've got to get some things out of the way.These have to do with the reality of selling.</p><p>In fact, there are only five things you can do to increase your income fromsales:</p><p><b>1. You can increase the number of dials you make.</b> That is to say, youcan increase the number of calls, which will, in turn, proportionally increasethe number of people you reach and thus improve your chances of creating a leadand closing a sale.</p><p><b>2. You can improve your ratio of calls made to calls completed.</b> This mayrest on your ability to leave compelling voice messages. It also may becontingent on your ability to bypass gatekeepers.</p><p><b>3. You can schedule more appointments.</b> Again, this involves knowing howto deal with gatekeepers, but it also means finding ways to keep the attentionof prospects and get them talking to you.</p><p><b>4. You can close more sales.</b> This is a big one. It requires that youhave a compelling story to tell your clients and for you to know what they needand how you can help them solve their problems.</p><p><b>5. You can get more money per sale.</b> Obviously this is a broad intentionwith everything you do, but here there is a very concrete set of steps you'llhave to take if you're going to make each sale more profitable to your company.You need to know how to motivate and close price increases and per-unit savings.</p><br><p>These five things are the only way you're going to improve your commission. Andnotice that three of the five have to do with improving your ratios. In point offact, your ratios are one of the most important things you must keep track ofduring the sales cycle:</p><p>• How many calls are you making to obtain each prospect?</p><p>• How many prospects are you converting into leads?</p><p>• How many leads are offering appointments?</p><p>• How many of these appointments are ending in closed sales?</p><br><p>The more you track these numbers, the more aware of them you'll become and,consequently, the better you'll be at meeting your expectations.</p><p>The more in control you are of your ratios, the more you control the results. Ifyou know that to get five prospects you need to make twenty-five sales coldcalls, that gives you a clear idea of how many calls you'll have to make inorder to get twenty prospects. If you're converting ten of those prospects intoleads/clients, then you know what to expect in terms of how many calls you'llneed to make to generate twenty clients. And if you can close with five of theseclients, you've created a metric of how many calls = prospects = leads = sales.</p><p>The results may, it's true, be discouraging, but it's always better to work fromspecific numbers than hopeful guesses.</p><p>The formula I recommend is <b>A > P > s</b></p><p>"A" stands for appointments; "P" stands for prospects; "S" stands for sales.Notice that the numbers (and the size of the letters) get smaller the further wego in the sequence. You'll have to make more appointments to get fewer prospectsand fewer prospects to get fewer sales. But at least with some numbers you knowwhere you are.</p><p>We might put another...