How did you do on you Win Loss ratio – number of sales deals won versus the number lost – in 2011? What will you do to improve it in 2012?
Do you even measure it? Probably not. Most sales people don’t. It never makes pleasant reading.
It can, however, prove very enlightening. Especially so when you measure numbers of hours spent on deals you didn’t win. What else could you have done with those hours which ultimately turned out to be wasted.
That’s what economists call the Opportunity Cost. If you hadn’t done something, what else could you have done, and how much would that have been worth? How does that compare with the ROI you got?
Following the Pareto Principle – sorry about another theory – it’s likely 80 % of your sales came from 20% of your time. That’s just a rule of thumb, but will do fine for an example. Just one day each week brings in the vast majority of your business, and the other four days go to waste.
Maybe if your efforts were better targeted, more focused, more disciplined, you could increase your sales by 50% in another day? That would be 120% in just two days.
What would you do with the other three?
The single biggest difference every sales professional can make is stop spending effort on deals which aren’t going to happen.
That’s why strategy, and process, and discipline are so important.
Come January 1st. every sales rep’s New Years Resolution should be to sacrifice activity in favour of effect, making what they do count, as opposed to counting what they do.
