When I ask new clients, “What’s the best most cost effective way for you to get new clients” they respond…

• Networking
• Cold Calling
• Referrals
• Purchased leads
• Direct mail
• email
• etc.

How Do You Know?

Then I ask, “How do you know?”  Now I get a puzzled look, a long pause, and then I hear “Well, that’s what I do.”

Next, I’ll ask, “What’s the worst most expensive way to get new clients?”  Again I get that puzzled look and then they’ll tell me they tried one of the things on the above list, and they didn’t get a single client from it so that must be the most expensive worst way to get a client.  Again I have to ask, “How do you know?”

My goal isn’t to annoy you.  You see most people DO NOT know either the best way or the least effective way to get new clients because…

• they’ve only tried a limited number of things
• they only try to get clients one way
• they assume certain things work and other things don’t work

All because they don’t gather the hard cold data required to correctly answer either question.  So rather than focusing 80% of their efforts on the 20% of the ways to get new clients that work… they do one of two things.

1. They put all their eggs in one basket and depend on one way of getting new clients
2. They try everything at once and don’t gather any data to determine what works and what doesn’t

Plus just because you tried something ONCE and it didn’t produce the results you want doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, it means it doesn’t work the way you did it.  Yet, there’s a very strong possibility that it could work very well if you just knew how to do it right.

Track as it Happens

The only way you can know what works and what doesn’t…

if one change makes something work better or worse…

if you need to do more of something or less of something is…

to track exactly what you’re doing and the results those actions produce AS IT HAPPENS.

Here’s what most sales people do.  They run full bore all week.  At the end of the week they look back through their day planner, receipts, and sales sheets to try to recreate everything that happened so they can fill out a weekly sales report.  The net result is a big waste of time.  Neither the sales person nor the person they handed the completed report over to actually learned a damned thing that will help that person change their results.  Here’s why.

Learning something so you can get better results wasn’t the objective of filling out the weekly sales report as far as the sales person is concerned.  They’re just doing it to keep their sales manager or whomever off their back.  They aren’t paying attention to the details of actions and results, they’re paying attention to the details of how they get paid and reimbursed.  And that’s why it’s so important that you track the actions you take in real time.

The reason you track in real time is so you can gather the data you need to make an informed decision about what works, what doesn’t work, and what doesn’t work when you do it the way you’re doing it now.  So let’s take something you might do to get new clients and use it to learn what to track, how to track it, and why you even bother tracking it.  How about networking?

Before you attend a networking event you must first evaluate whether the event meets your requirements.  Your requirements might include…

• most attendees fall within your criteria for an ideal client
• there will be opportunities to speak with other attendees
• you are prepared to communicate your unique market position
• you have an offer to advance your connection with the people you meet

With all your criteria met you are prepared to attend the event.  As soon as you leave the event you need to track your data.  I recommend you track your daily numbers on your To Do List.  So what data would you record?

• number of attendees you interacted with (a)
• number of attendees who positively reacted to your unique market position (b)
• number of attendees who responded to your offer (c)

From just this simple data you can now calculate the effectiveness of your unique market position message.

Message effectiveness = (b/a)*100

Plus your response rate.

Response = (c/b)*100

As you continue to track the people who responded in your sales funnel you gather more data that will help you know which networking events truly are cost effective and which aren’t.  That comes later though.  The most important number initially is the effectiveness of your message.  That’s what you would work on tweaking first.

You have the data for the effectiveness of your message stated one way.  The next step is changing your message just a little and testing that version of your message against the previous version choosing a winner and then trying another little tweak to your message.  You keep doing this until you can’t beat a particular version of your message.

This may sound tedious to you, but just how tedious is it doing the same things over and over and getting crappy results.  I’m a little ahead of myself though.

Weekly Review

Because you’ve tracked all your actions and all your results in one place, on your To Do List, at the end of the week everything is easy to review.  Every time you took an action you recorded the results from that action so you have a running tally.  Compare this week to last week.  Results should either be the same or better.

Please note you must not make changes on the fly, you must do things consistently for the entire week.  So for example, you can test one version of your unique market position in all your interactions for the week and obtain data on that specific version overall not just from one networking event.

Adapt and Thrive

At the end of the week after you review your data then, and only then, can you choose what you plan to adapt and how you’ll adapt that.  That’s how you would learn whether one version of your unique market position was more effective than another version.  No guessing, no knee jerk reactions allowed.

Continue tracking and adapting each week for a full quarter.

Quarterly Review

Once a quarter track % completion on your “Strategic Sales Master Plan“.  You recorded your top 3 goals for each critical factor in the table.  For each goal there is an entry for date and % completion.  The date represents the target date for completion of the goal.  Once a quarter evaluate how far you are toward the completion of that goal and enter that number on that line.

Ideally you should make consistent progress or complete goals on target.  When that doesn’t happen you have to pinpoint why it’s not happening, what you need to do to get back on track, and implement the new actions.  Bottom line when something doesn’t work it isn’t something to get all upset about.  As Henry Ford II said “… just deal with it.”  So what, you now know one way something doesn’t work.  You are just one step closer to what does work.

Some things will work better than others.  Some things will reveal themselves as the most cost effective ways to get new clients.  Do more of those things.  Some things will reveal themselves as the least cost effective ways to get new clients.  Perhaps you simply just stop doing those things.

What’s important is that you know exactly what works, how it works, and why it works.  Because once you know that information you have uncovered repeatable, reproducible, and cost effect ways to achieve the sales you want.

Coach Cheryl

Do it Yourself

Do it with a Little Help

Do it with Guidance

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under sales coaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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