Reverse Engineering Your Success

Guest Contributor: David Colomb
David's Posts - David's Blog

I am in the midst of starting a new sales job, and as I am setting my goals and getting myself motivated for success, I have sat down to come up with numbers and goals. To plan for my numbers I decided to work backwards to come up with my daily objective.

I am a money motivated person, so I came up with what I wanted to earn at the end of my first year, once I had that number, I made the calculation that at a 10% rate of commission, I'd need to come up with X number of dollars in sales. I then contacted successful sales people in the organization and asked them what the average sales amount was for them in the last year. I also asked what they were finding as a closing ratio. Once I had those numbers, I sat down and did the math, how many contacts did I need to make a day to get the number of opportunities to present that I needed, and then close the sales to realize my numbers. Of course, as I go through the year, I'll need to keep track of my numbers to see if I need to make midcourse corrections to reach my goals.

The next step was to sit down with my Sales/Operations Manager to integrate his objectives in to my game plan. We are selling a service, pest control, so I needed to sit down and get his input on what segments of the market he wanted us to market. I have found that in selling services it's important to get buy in from the Operations people, if they don't like the business you sell, they can sabotage your sale. Find the sweet spot and you'll be more successful than just selling in the blind.

Now that I've put together all of these factors I'm able to get up each morning and have a game plan in place as to where I'm going and what I'm going to do to get to my goals. Let's hope it all works out.

I was reading a book on Cold Calling, the nemesis of all salesmen. I've come to believe that we salespeople have made cold calling in to a boogie man that we always see as the ultimate challenge. The person that wrote this book gave a very basic premise, the premise being that no matter what, you'll sell a third of the people that you contact, no matter what you do, another third won't buy from you, no matter what you do, and the middle third can be manipulated by your salesmanship and abilities. While some days, those numbers seem very far-fetched, I'm willing to accept them as being very close to correct in a macro sense. So what that means to me is that I've got to get out there and pound the street and make the contacts. I'm working in a Branch Office that hasn't had a successful salesperson in quite some time, so I don't have a pipeline in place. In this type of situation it's critical that I build that base as soon as possible, so wish me luck.