According to the folks over at SalesGravy, selling is not a numbers game; it’s a performance game. They say that if you think selling is a numbers game, then you simply lack the skills to sell, which is a bit short sighted. They may be right to a certain extent, however, selling is still absolutely a numbers game and knowing your numbers can help get your revenue to the next level. Of course, you need to always build your craft, reading booksor listening to podcasts or reviewing your calls – whatever it takes to improve. Selling is a numbers game – you just need to track the right numbers.
Using a tool as simple as an Excel sheet or Google Sheets can be just enough to track your performance and I’m going to show you how in this spreadsheet that I use when selling. By filling in a little bit of information to get started, then inserting information like how many calls/drop ins you make each day and how many of those resulted in an opportunity, you’ll be able to get a view of what you need to do to hit your goals.
NOTE: This is the exact spreadsheet that our salespeople at Patriot Chimneyuse to help keep track of their activities aside from using the CRM. I mention this because this exact template is not for everyone. You may need to change a few things around.
What You Need to Get Started
- Monthly Revenue Quota – how much do you need to sell to meet your goals for the month? To create this, I like to work backwards from an annual number (annual revenue/12 months). You may have a more complex method – whatever it is, just plug it in.
- Win Rate – This tells you your success rate; for every opportunity you create, how likely will it turn into a closed-won. If you’re just getting started or don’t have much data to show, you can make one up and plug in the proper number later. I do recommend you use a lower percent, though. Formula: (Closed-Won Opportunities) / (Total Opportunities that were both Closed-Won + Closed-Lost)
- Average Order Value (AOV) – Tracks the average dollar amount spent each time a customer places an order with you. If you don’t have this information, feel free to use a colleague’s or insert what you wish it is (be sure to be realistic, of course…) and update later with an accurate number. Formula: (Revenue/Total # Orders)
Getting Started
First thing you need to do with this spreadsheet is make a copy of it. You’ll be able to view it all you want, but in order for it to work for you, you must make a copy. You can do this by going to File > Make a Copy.
With your fresh, new copy of the sheet, insert your quota, win rate, and AOV. This will begin to populate Monthly Created Revenue, # Opps Needed, # Opps per week.
Monthly Created Revenue – Based on your win rate and monthly quota, you’re able to figure out how much revenue you need to add to your pipeline. For example, in figure 2 below, if your monthly quota is $11,267 and your win rate is 30%, then you will need to find and create $37,556.67 per month to meet your goals.
*If the wording is confusing, obviously feel free to change things around*
# Opps Needed (plus per week)– Just like with Monthly Created Revenue, this one tells you how many opps you should create per month. This is based on the AOV and your Monthly Created Revenue. With a monthly quota of 11,267 and an AOV of $3000, you only need to close 4 deals to meet (and actually exceed) your quota. But when you only close 30% of deals created, you need to be sure to find and create about 13 new opportunities each month.
Logging Activity
This is where I think it gets really interesting. Each day you’re working (weekends, vacations, and holidays are in gray; don’t fill anything in) fill in the blanks. You’ll keep track of calls, how many times you reached the person you were trying to reach, how many opps you created, revenue created
Calls & Drop Ins – Here, you will simply log how many calls you make. I log in bound and out bound calls, but I do not count scheduled calls. This is because this sheet is meant strictly for prospecting. Scheduled calls and meetings would throw off your stats since you should always be meeting with the person you’re trying to contact.
Calls/Drop Ins Contacts – Most calls I make I don’t reach anybody. But when I do, I want to count it. On days that I reached a lot of folks, I can make a note about when it was. Maybe in your industry you’ll have better luck Wednesday mornings.
Ops from Calls/Drop Ins – This is how many opportunities you created. We keep this separate so that we can track which method works best for us.
Revenue Created – Here is where you will keep track of how much revenue you added to your pipeline per day. Pretty self explanatory.
Inspections/Deals Closed/Revenue Won – These are additional fields that you can plug in if you’d like to keep up with what’s going on. Inspections are for our sales people at Patriot Chimney, since their main goal is to schedule inspections. Deals closed are for their larger deals beyond the simple inspection. And revenue won is the section for how much revenue they actually won and created for the business.
What It Tells you
When you have all of your information, now you can read the data! The orange bar tells you how good you are and what you need to do per day to reach your goals.
Calls/Drop Ins per Op – In Figure 4 below, you’ll see 25 and 4.00%. This tells you how many calls result in an opportunity and what percent results in an opportunity. This means that if you want to create one opportunity per day, then you only need to make 25 calls per day to reach your goal.
Conclusion
The other bits of information aren’t totally pertinent to everyone and is pretty specific to front-end sales in the chimney industry. However, the great part of this spreadsheet is the fact that you can customize it for however you want. For example, you can add in a custom commission calculator using the monthly total revenue generated at the bottom of Column L.
Leave a comment below and let me know how you plan to use this spreadsheet. If you need help customizing, please let me know and I’ll be happy to collaborate with you.
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