Ask a bunch of sales people about their personal sales plan and you’ll quickly discover a trend. Productive sales people, regardless of what they are selling, are committed to making contact with a predetermined number of people every day. Take away all the smoke and mirrors that typically surround sales and you will be able to see contractors should stick to the same rule.
Let’s apply a simple math example to illustrate the point. Say that a young college student was just hired as a copy sales representative. The sales goals set by his manager are four new machines per month. The new employee has about 2,342 prospective customers in his territory that don’t use his company’s products.
The salesman chooses to send out well written post cards. He’ll send 50 cards per day. This means that in a 5 day week he will mail out 250 cards. With a normal 1% response rate he will in all likelihood talk to 3 people in a week, or 12 people a month. He only has to sell one-third of those people to make his goal.
So, the question becomes, are you closing one-third of your prospects? And if you are, how many people are you contacting? If you are only selling one-fourth of your prospects then start contacting more people. Like I said, it really is a numbers game.