Selling When No One is Buying by Stephan Schiffman

Author:Stephan Schiffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Business, an imprint of Adams Media,
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Get Over the Peaks and

Through the Valleys

Peaks and valleys are a regular part of the sales rep’s condition— never more so than when times are bad. There’s really no way to avoid them, but you can smooth things a bit by understanding your ratios. I’ve already discussed the importance of this. Now I’d like to give you a practical example of how ratios can be used.

Let us, for example, assume that sales rep Sally has twenty active prospects and that over time she discovered that twenty potential clients is just about the right figure for her. If she has any more than that going at one time, it is too many to handle. Any fewer than that and Sally’s commission checks seem to get smaller.

Further, let us say her closing ratio is one in five; that is, for every five potential closers she’s pursuing, one will actually sign a contract. Finally, let me suppose that Sally signs one prospect.

The conventional wisdom is that Sally has to cold call until she finds another prospect to replace the one she signed. But as so often happens, the conventional wisdom is wrong. If her ratios are to be believed, the moment she signed one contract, there were four others among her prospects likely to turn her down. So, in order to replace that one signed client, she really has to come up with five more prospects.

I know this sounds a little counterintuitive, like a kind of mathematical legerdemain. Let me try to explain it in terms of flipping coins. Every time you flip a coin the odds are fifty-fifty that it will turn up heads and fifty-fifty that it show tails. The odds remain constant, fifty-fifty, even if that coin has shown up heads ten times in a row. But at the end of a year of coin flipping, heads will have appeared roughly half the time and tails the other half.

It’s the same with your sales ratio. You may say, “Steve, just because I signed one client on doesn’t mean I’m not going to sign the next one and the one after that.”

And you’re absolutely right. Like the coin that keeps coming up heads, you can have a peak week or a month where your prospects find you and your company irresistible, where no one can say no to you. But ultimately the averages come into play, and the chances are your ratio will hover around one closing for every five prospects.

So at some point, you’re likely to get a bunch of refusals in a row and find yourself in a valley so deep you don’t know how, when, or if you’ll be able to scale the next hill. And the odds of that happening drastically increase in an economic downturn.

I understand if every time you close a deal you pause to do a celebratory lap around the office figuring you have time to replace one prospect. But what Sally has to do is start looking for five prospects, so she’ll have potentially peak possibilities when a valley seems just over the horizon.

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