Welcome back to the “Sales Planning For Success” series, in Part 4 we reviewed the cockpit which visually depicted at a high level what our expectations were. In this section, we would expand on the activities and how we track our efforts.
Columns B – G ( in figure 1 below ) represents your activity tracking around Emails, Calls, Opportunities and Meetings. This is further broken into the number of weeks in the month.
I’m a firm believer of setting aside a designated time on a weekly basis, in order to evaluate your business plan and strategise. Make this time either early in the morning or late in the evening where there are no distractions. You will need complete silence and be totally focussed, I find during these planning sessions, your are immersed into your plan and it helps you steer in the right direction.
Admittedly, this does require a certain level of discipline and motivation. The net benefit here is that as you get into this discipline, you are able to profoundly analyse your efforts. Let’s be honest, we have all experienced difficult times in sales, and if you haven’t yet, be in expectation and prepare for it.
When you’re at your low point, we call this period “Famine Time”. In the event you experience a famine, my recommendation is for you to revert to the business plan, remember the effort you have recorded over the last week, month, quarter or year. You would undoubtedly be filled with confidence, this would encourage you to persevere and you will certainly achieve your defined success.
Just like a pyramid that only displays 20% and 80% is hidden, your colleagues are totally oblivious of all the planning sessions and your dedication to tracking your activities. For this reason, they only see the 20% when you live the success of your efforts – which we call the “Feast Time”.
You might hear some colleagues utter the works, “you’ve had luck on your side this month, quarter or year. Your response should always be, I agree however, the word LUCK reads as Labour Under Correct Knowledge”
Luck doesn’t just happen by chance, it takes a calculated effort to meet the opportune time- this creates luck.
If you keep your focus on the end goal which is your destination, read more in Part 1 of the series, this becomes second nature and in fact, you will relish your end of week planning sessions.
How do I track my activities?
At the end of every prospecting day, I tally up how many calls, emails, meetings and opportunities I’ve done for that day, and it’s literally marking a strike in my book after each call made. You can call me old school but I’m a big believer of writing things in ink.
That said, there are tools that would offer you these activity reports should you decide not to implement the “old school” method.
At the end of the week I will review all my sent emails and meetings and include this in my activity dashboard. This is then recorded in my worksheet in Figure 1 below.
As you can also notice on the report, there is a section to set your weekly objectives around emails, calls, opps and meetings. This ( Figure 1 – Input worksheet ) is directly linked to Figure 2 ( also below ) which acts as the output and therefore summarises our targets vs actual activities.
- Figure 1 – Input worksheet
- Figure 2 – Output Worksheet ( below )
We need to hold ourselves accountable of our actions, for me, this means always “being in the know” of how I’m performing against the targets I’ve set for myself.
The chart above represents the targets set as you can see from cells B-G. Cells H-N represents the actuals and P-T details the delta.
Remember the call targets we set in our earlier blog Part 4? Whereby we worked out all the channels and opportunities we need in order to hit our goal. We also defined our sales cycle, our conversion rate, aov and no of deals needed in Part 2 .
It’s helpful to list them in this cockpit section, to help remind you of your high level metrics.
It’s my desire that you take action and implement some of these principles, ff you feel the need for further explanation, feel free to contact me at mike@metricdrivenselling.com.