Top 5 Suggestions to Jump Start Your Sales Year

By Dave Kurlan

Would you like next year to be your best sales year ever?  Who doesn’t? I feel your enthusiasm and would like the same for my team, our partners and our clients.  Are there things that top sellers do that cause them to have better years than mediocre salespeople?  You bet.  Here are my top 5 suggestions:

1. Get Bigger.  This is a very effective approach for having a great year.  Suppose you have a $1 Million quota and last year your average sale or account was $25,000.  That means that you needed about 40 of those in 2014.  But if you increase the size by just 15%, to $28,750 you’ll need 6 fewer.
2. Get Friendlier.  This tip will make a huge difference.  Suppose you convert 1 of 10 calls to a scheduled meeting.  If you could sound warmer and friendlier in the first 10 seconds of the call, people would choose to talk with you, making it easier to get a prospect’s attention and get them engaged.  You’ll convert 10% more calls and double the number of first meetings. If your win-rate is 25% and you change nothing else, you’ll close 25% of twice as many opportunities, doubling the number of sales or accounts you close in 2015.
3. Shut the Door.  Let’s repurpose the three numbers we have already introduced; a $1 million quota, $25,000 average deal and 25% win-rate.  If you improve your win rate by 10%, you’ll close 27.5% of your opportunities – 4 more deals – for an increase in sales of  $100,000.  You can do that by making sure your opportunities are completely qualified before you quote, propose or demo.
4. Get Shorter.  I know – I already told you to get bigger but shorter works too!  If you have a 3 month sales cycle and you shorten it by 1 month, which you can do by following the advice in tip #3, the 10 deals that would have crept into the first quarter or 2016 would get closed in the last quarter.  That’s an increase of 250,000!
5. Merge.  If you apply all of the previous 4 tips and get bigger, friendlier, shorter and shut the door, you won’t believe what an increase you’ll achieve.  Your average sale will be $28,750, and using the tips above you’ll close 122 of those suckers instead of 40!  That will give you 2015 revenue of $3,507,500 – an increase of $2,507,500!  Don’t believe me?  Do the math!  In #2, you doubled from 40 to 80 the number of deals you would close and in number 3 you improved your closing percentage by 10% and in #4 you took a quarter’s worth of deals, now 22 of them, and pulled them from Q1 into Q4.  Wow.

Of course, the two biggest challenges with this are:

1. Do you have enough prospects for numbers like these to work?
2. Do you have enough time to handle the administrative and delivery obligations?

Even if these numbers are nothing like your numbers, you can use this approach to completely reinvent yourself as a salesperson.  Go ahead!  Using your actual metrics, calculate your new average sale, call conversion ratio, closing percentage, and sales cycle length.   After you’ve done the math, determine the impact that this success will have on your personal income.  What does your new plan look like for 2015?