“What's our value proposition?” - “What is our mission statement?” - “How come we don't have better marketing collateral?” - “We need to update our colors!”

Over the years, I have heard many people, quite often in senior management, go around and around, in meeting after meeting, about why sales are down. Now, of course, there are times when the economy is off, or a particular industry is hit especially hard. But if you ask these same companies about the specifics of their sales peoples' activity, they either can't answer the question or don't know what you're talking about.

I was very fortunate over 30 years ago in my sales career to work for a sales manager who was very sales activity focused.  Before he talked about closing a sale or our listening and questioning skills, he would pay very close attention to our day to day sales activity. How many dials are you making on the phone;  how many appointments came from those dials; how many sales came from those appointments? I remember very clearly in one of our one-on-one meetings, he looked at me and said, "Hes, do you know you have the highest closing ratio in the office?" I looked at him, beaming with pride, thinking I was about to get an “atta boy”.  I replied, "No, I didn't know I had the highest closing ratio in the office". Then he says, "but you are consistently third in revenue or lower in the office." This caught me totally off guard, where’s my “atta boy” I thought?!

He laid out the numbers of the 10 or 12 of us in that sales office. He showed that there were two other sales reps who were going on 13, 14, even 15 appointments a week where I was consistently going on 8 or 9 appointments a week. About half the appointments I went on, I came back with the business so my closing ratio was consistently around 50%. The guys who were going out on more appointments did not write half of those accounts, but they still wrote in actual numbers more accounts per week than I did. So, if I was closing four new accounts a week, they were closing five or six. Times 50 weeks in a year, that adds up to a lot more business. Their closing ratios weren't as good as mine, but they were writing more business, and that's what mattered.

The sales manager did say to me it was great that my time on the road was productive, but he had listened to my conversations and thought I did too much selling of our product on the phone and not enough in person. "Your job on the phone is just to get in the door, and then once you're there, write the business" he told me. The other guys were better at getting in the door than I was. The point is, if that sales manager hadn't been tracking all of our activity very carefully, he never could have given me that excellent insight and helped me write more business.

This is Sales 101, and yet even companies with enormous revenue and established market presence will look at you blankly when you ask them about the day-to-day activity of their sales teams. Since that meeting 30 years ago, I've learned that all selling comes down to the same six steps regardless of the industry or whether you're selling a product or a service.

Those six steps are:

1. How many people did you try to contact?

2. Of those people, how many did you actually have contact with?

3. Of those people, how many have a need or a want for your company’s solution?

4. Of those people, how many have money to spend NOW?

5. Of those people, how many will make a decision NOW?

6. Repeat the process!

That sounds boring and tedious. It is. Now let’s get a little depressed. Say you work in an industry where what you sell is a very common item such as office equipment or insurance. Graphically those first five steps might look like this assuming you’re contacting 100 people a week:

Yes, “degression”, not progression because the numbers are always degressing. The point is to convey how the numbers will always greatly decrease from those you tried to contact to those who actually became customers. This is something we all “know” but don’t always follow closely enough. Are the numbers always this skewed? No. The size of the market changes the ratios. How many people walk into a Rolls Royce dealership without having an idea of the price? Very few if any. But even at the R&R dealership, there are still more “lookers” than buyers.

All of these steps are completely trackable and yet the vast majority of companies simply don't do it. Why not? Because it's tedious, it's boring, it’s simplistic. It's a whole lot more fun to have creative "brainstorming sessions”  where people talk about the messaging, the marketing, the logo, the mission statement, and the value propositions. The underlying belief being if they just get those things “right”, they’ll magically sell more.

Don't misunderstand me, all of those factors play an important role in a successful sales organization. But they are all secondary. All selling starts with a very basic mathematical equation. I knew a salesperson many years ago who said they were going to work a lot harder that year so they could have a better year than the previous one. I asked him what part of the sales process he was going to work harder at? He looked at me kind of blankly. Are you not setting enough appointments? Are you simply not making enough calls to set enough appointments? Or are you making plenty of calls, and you're going on plenty of appointments, but you're simply not converting those appointments to accounts? They couldn't answer the question. They were simply going to "work harder" without a specific idea of where they needed to improve. None of this is meant to be a criticism. It's all very, very common in the sales profession (and yes, sales is a profession).

People always like to think their industry is the exception. They say “oh, that’s great that you follow that. It’s great that you know that, but our business is different.”  No, it's not. Their business is not different. Their ego isn’t even different in thinking their business is different. Everyone thinks their business is different and it isn’t. It actually doesn’t matter if you sell Rolls Royces or toothpicks. The only thing that changes is the size of the market and the ratios of each stage to the next (assuming the market for Rolls Royces is a good bit smaller than for toothpicks). But the process is always the same.

So, where does the title of this article come from? It comes from 30 years of experience seeing companies ring their hands over lackluster sales numbers but not be able to answer the most basic questions about the day-to-day sales activity of their sales team. Tracking the sales activity should always be step one. The salespeople will scream that this is micromanaging. But look at any professional athlete, their coaches tell them precisely what they are doing right and doing wrong.

That sales manager 30 years ago was not micromanaging me, he was paying close attention to my day-to-day activity, and then gave me very valuable advice about where I could get better, which I did. So, before you start talking about your company's value proposition, mission statement, sales strategy, marketing collateral, logo, and company colors, make sure you're not skipping Step One.