Make 2009 the year you reinvent your sales

Most sales people report 30% of their day is spent talking directly to customers-and I find it can be as high as 60% and as low as 10%. If you're unsure, estimate that 50% of your time per day is spent selling and the other half is spent in meetings, at lunch, driving, talking to coworkers, entering data into CRM, research or doing general administrative work. Enter this number as a decimal in the formula. Granted, these numbers are moving targets. You need to take into account accelerators, bonuses new hires, among other factors, but it is nevertheless a reasonably accurate measure to use when assessing sales productivity. Let's test your own productivity for 2008. What was your total take-home pay (i.e., salaries plus commissions)? What was your total revenue tally for 2008? Simple division will tell you if your productivity levels were mediocre or high. I recommend that managers conduct that test for each team member, as well as for the entire sales team. Closing ratios can be as low as .008 (125:1), and as high as 0.5 (1:2). It depends on whether you're cold calling from the yellow pages (which has the lowest closing ratios), or growing your business based on referrals (which has the highest closing ratios). Be honest with yourself and make sure you consider your closing ratio from net new contacts to close-not just the closing ratio from proposal stage to close. Reinventing yourself ought to be about more than just getting a new outfit and haircut. Why not start by making changes where it really counts-in your sales results! More sales in 2009 means more commissions…which means you'll have more money to really spoil yourself later on. The first step is to know where you stood at the end of 2008. Like most sales professionals, it's likely that you can quickly recite exactly how much you closed and how much you earned last year. But have you stopped to consider just how productive you were? It's a question worth pondering.