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How Much Wood Should A Woodchuck Chuck?

Written by: Will Turner

Article Overview: Being busy, like a woodchuck, is not the same as being productive. Learn six things you can do to close more sales and make better use of your time.

How Much Wood Should A Woodchuck Chuck?

How Much Wood Should A Woodchuck Chuck?

Do you ever feel like a woodchuck? If you do, you’re busy every day chucking wood. By the time you get to the end of the day or the end of the week, you’re exhausted from all the chucking. And even though you’ve got a stack of chucked wood, it’s not enough.

If you’re like the exhausted woodchuck, it’s time to reevaluate. Most salespeople stay busy and work really hard. Of course, they’re not literally chucking wood, but they are prospecting and making sales. They get to the end of their day, the end of their week or the end of their quarter and they just don’t have enough sales. Yet they’re worn out and tired.

The problem is that the closing ratios of most salespeople is about 20%; and that’s if they’re good. That means that 80% of their time is being spent with the wrong prospects. That’s a lot of wasted time and energy without any results to show for it.

How would things change if you could close 80% of your prospects instead of 20%? How much more time would you have to do the things you want to do – like develop stronger relationships with your best clients, provide better service, and actually have a life outside of work.

There are many ways to dramatically increase your closing ratios and none of them have anything to do with using closing techniques. Here are six things you can start doing immediately that will get your closing ratios climbing higher.

• Prioritize Your Day – Determine the most important tasks you need to complete on a daily basis to hit your sales goals. There should only be three or four key tasks such as contacting prospects and meeting with prospects. To find out what your top tasks are, simply ask yourself the question: “What are the direct activities that will have the biggest impact on my sales success?” Make sure that you prioritize your time each day to include appropriate time on your most important tasks. Block your time for these tasks and protect it just as you would protect an appointment with a prospect.

• Identify Your Bull’s Eye Market – Narrow your prospecting activities to your best prospects. Avoid the temptation to go after the low-hanging fruit. Instead, determine which group of prospects gets the most value from your product or service. Select a distinct market segment and start building your visibility and credibility with those people.

• Develop A Prospecting System – Most salespeople have a “hit or miss” prospecting system. To avoid this haphazard approach, you will have to get more disciplined with your prospecting activities. First, you must determine which methods you are going to use to connect with prospects and the activities you will need to engage in. For example, you may cold call with the plan of converting a certain percentage to face-to-face appointments. Second, review your numbers based on your most recent experience to determine how many appointments you need to close a sale along with the other proper follow-up activities. Third, schedule the activities in your calendar taking into account all the other things you are responsible for. In other words, make it real. If you have to make three appointments a day, but you know that Fridays are reserved for administrative work and staff meetings, then you need to adjust your daily tasks accordingly for the rest of the week.

• Remove The Sales Pressure – One of the primary reasons why closing ratios are so low for most salespeople is because they exert subtle or overt sales pressure with their prospects. When pressure is exerted, the prospect often will disengage by throwing out false objections or stalls or simply avoiding future contacts. Have you ever had prospects that won’t return your phone calls after you’ve talked or met with them? If so, you are probably guilty of acting like a “typical” salesperson.

To remove pressure, examine your communication process. Are you asking questions or telling? While you should be asking questions, you need to make sure that the questions you ask aren’t putting undue pressure on your prospect. Review the questions you typically ask from your prospects’ perspective to determine if you need to do any rephrasing.

• Attract The Right Business – Carefully evaluate your prospects to make sure that you are securing the right business. The only thing worse than not making enough sales is making bad sales. Bad sales are with clients that are not a good fit for you, your company or your product. These clients will become a thorn in your side and take up way too much time and energy that should be spent elsewhere.

• Get More Referrals – You have instant credibility with referrals, because someone is recommending you. Consequently, spending more time with referrals naturally leads to higher closing ratios. You can set yourself up for more referrals by doing business with the “right clients.” That’s because the right clients become raving fans when you take care of them better than anyone else does. You can easily do this if you aren’t wasting precious time with bad clients. The right clients will refer more people like themselves to you.

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