5 Ways to Leverage History to Sell More
March
I know the Sales Bloggers Union topic this month is “How Were Your March 2010 Sales.” Since this is December of 2009, the gist of the topic is that March 2010 sales are already being chose by salespeople’s actions this month (at smallest amount for those with a 3 month or so sales cycle).
But I want to take a look at your sales last March (March 2009). What can you gain by looking at your sales from last March? That was six months ago! How can it help your sales this month? Or next March?
Selling is a profession of immediacy. Commission salespeople get paid for what they sell today. The presence of weekly, monthly, and yearly sales goals stresses the need for immediacy. Agreed all the attention on the “What have you sold for me lately” mentality of sales executives and managers (I don’t disagree with it, I just reckon it gets out of hand in some organizations to the point that it is no longer healthy for the long term health of the business), it’s not common for salespeople to look backward to analyze performance of a previous month, especially when it is six months prior.
Here are five questions that will help you analyze your March sales from earlier this year, and then use that information to maximize your sales now.
1. Who did you meet with that is still a viable prospect, but who you allowed to drop off your radar screen?
Low-hanging fruit is juicy and accessible, and any salesperson would be a fool for passing it by for more high-maintenance fruit. But once all the low-hanging fruit has been consumed, a salesperson is confronted with either waiting for more low-hanging fruit to grow (thereby ceding control of his career to external forces), or going after fruit that requires more advanced effort.
Follow up is a weakness of many sales professionals. They may have started with excellent intentions, but six months later, they’ve forgotten all about the follow-up and are pulling their hair out looking for new sales to meet the monthly butt. What’s incorrect with that picture?
The nice business about let customers drop off your radar screen is that you can quickly recalibrate and pick them up again. Radar is like that.
2. Who did you sell to, and why did they buy?
Salespeople are often just so darned pleased to have a sale that they are energized to go on to the next prospect, hoping the magic will continue. But when we do this, we are overlooking the opportunity to identify the real reason each of our customers bought from us.
Were you in the right house at the right time? Was your pricing better than your competition’s? Did they like you or your company better? Did you do a better job of selling? What needs were met by you, your company, and your product or service that your competitor didn’t or couldn’t meet?
Carrying out an analysis to identify why your customer bought can provide you with information that will help you over and over again.
3. What did you do to engineer a clear outcome?
Sometimes salespeople amaze themselves with the sales results they’re able to get. But a small constructive analysis can bring subconscious behaviors in to the realm of conscious thought. Conscious thought allows us to examine our behaviors, question them, and connect dots that may have been out of our consciousness previously.
If you can quantify your behaviors, you can repeat them. If you leave behaviors up to opportunity, they can’t be quantified. Find out what you’re doing that facility so you can make it work better for you now and in the future.
4. What can you sell now to those customers that already bought last March?
Over and over again, I’ve seen sales professionals call upon their book of past clients to raise them from a quota deficit or worse. We need to cultivate sales from the fertile fields of our selling past to squeeze the most from our restricted resources.
There just may be one or two or fifty customers you served last March who would buy from you again, if you’d only question.
5. Have you extracted referrals from your March customers?
Have you questioned? Did you contact them? Did you make it simple for your March customers to refer their contacts to you?
Maybe you intended to but never got around to it. Now’s a fantastic time to get around to it.
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Here’s to March of 2009, and to all the Marches of the future, too.