Lord Ember Stone's Quest

Can you diagnose your business on a ‘Single Sheet’ of paper? Here are some key steps to help identify your essential competencies and performance metrics. Because numbers don’t lie.

1) Identify Your Essential Competencies and Performance Metrics

If We asked you to list all the essential competencies that YOU are in control of – the ones that are absolutely critical for you to be successful in your sales position…could you do it?

For example…

Essential Competency or not?

” Converting conversations to appointments? (yes it is)
” What about filling out paperwork? No! (That’s a related task)
” What about closing ratio? (Sure it is.)
” Degree of success in turning a first appointment into an opportunity? (absolutely)

Get the picture?

Now, if you truly want to adopt a self-management system that will work FOR you – not against you, you first have to “access” what is an essential competency and what’s merely a related competency.

To do this, sit down and list any sales metrics and performance numbers inter-related to your competency numbers and your desired revenue results. (Hint: “Sales Cycle” and “Average Revenue” per sale are two.)

2) Diagnose Your Business on a Single Sheet of Paper

If I ran into you on a train or in an elevator, would you be prepared to tell me what you do (and how it benefits me or those I know) – in under 1 minute…That’s called your 30-second commercial. Most people don’t have one, yet everybody needs one.

One way to understand more of the obvious benefits your products and services bring to the table is to start to view and diagnose your business more scientifically. You will also see how the numbers work and which areas are most important to your short and long-term success.

Ask yourself…What happens if your closing ratio reduces by 30% and your average revenue per sale increases by $2500? How does that affect your desired results?

Write your competency measurements and sales metrics on a sheet of paper. Calculate ratios in line with competencies and average numbers in line with your sales metrics. Assign your revenue object or quota. Play with the numbers and ratios to see how they are inter-related and how they affect each other.

3) Calculate your ‘Magic Number’

“Not setting enough new appointments on a routine basis” is like a malignant cancerous growth slowly eating away at the heart of most sales organizations.
The reason for this is because most of us do not identify how many new appointments are needed on a weekly basis based on individual competency numbers and performance metrics.

That’s like diagnosing with blindfolds on.

Every one is different; we all have a ‘Magic Number’. And it’s personal to only you. If you routinely achieve it, you will routinely meet your desired results. Since it is a dynamic number that changes from week to week, it’s important to understand how it is inter-related with other competency ratios, performance metrics and desired revenue results.It’s important to include your ‘Magic Number’ in your self-management system.

4) Train to the ‘Napkin Rule’

The ‘Napkin Rule’ simple means, putting aside all those sales automation systems for 30 days and keep track of your essential competency and performance metrics on a single napkin.

Compute updates daily. Store the napkin in your pocket. When the napkin fills up, transfer it to a legal pad to show month to date. Have nothing else on the legal pad except your essential competency ratios and sales performance metrics. After 30 business days, transpose the legal pad metrics to your favorite computer software spreadsheet, and track it for 90 days.

This simple but powerful “Napkin Rule” will help you become the CEO of your business.

5) Run Your Numbers, Don’t Run after Quota

Concentrate on your numbers NOT your quota so you can diagnose performance trends before a revenue crisis. Then you have the power to institute strategies and tactics for immediate recovery.

Reaching and exceeding sales quotas consistently has very little to do with product, pricing and competition. But it has everything to do with ‘Process’.

Identify the core competencies that are necessary to be successful in your sales routine. Then train to Powerful Routines to increase your ratios of effectiveness. Document these meaningful business metrics and review them weekly. Build a simple but dynamic self-management system and outperform your peers and competition while assuring your revenue success.

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The Internet has changed how people do their business. Even small business owners are able to reach global market inexpensively nowadays, selling anything from apparel, collectibles, to computer software, service and coaching.

The core of every business is sales. Many of the strategies to increase sales offline are applicable online, but not all of them. On the Internet, everybody can effort to fail fast and learn from it. Better still, after years of testing and tracking what works online, people can just learn from other people’s experience and cut the learning curve tremendously.

Here are 5 of the surefire ways to increase sales:

1. Establish a sound affiliate program

If it is just another affiliate program, then don’t expect to have different results. Focus on building a sound affiliate program, with the tools and materials to support affiliates to promote a program easily. After all, affiliates work like clockwork and should be seen as a team. Provide them with the right promotion tools and they will more likely promote the program.

Give the customers an option to join the affiliate program after purchase. Satisfied customers are one of the best marketing for any business. Spread the good words through word of mouth. Best of all, they are paid just for doing that.

2. Follow-up after first purchase

The hardest task in any business is acquiring the first sale. Make sure that capturing customers’ name and email addresses are the least information gathered from a sale. With that information in hand, follow-up with existing customers, probably through an automated mechanism like timely autoresponder.

This effort has been proven to decrease refund on products and increase customers’ satisfaction. Every once in a while, mention a related product that might be of interest to the customers. Write a review and provide real results. Such promotion is extremely inexpensive, but very effective in practice. The product can be anything, including an affiliate program.

3. Use up-sell technique

Just before a customer check out to the payment gateway, prompt for optional upgrade to the better, bigger, or nicer product for a fairly steep discount, preferably not available elsewhere.

A certain number of customers will choose the option, which translates into additional sales, almost without additional effort.

4. Provide discount coupons

Coupons urge customers to come back and shop. Promotional coupons work for both advertising and some forms of joint venture. Customers love to know that they get lower price for what they buy. Coupons make it so real and tangible.

5. Cross-promote with other related products

There is no limit as to how this could be accomplished. Joint venture with other business or even competitors is feasible as long as it brings a win-win situation.

One example would be to give away sample of other product or service as part of the whole package. As long as the sample is relevant to the customer, this promotion could only be seen as an added value instead of pure advertising.

There are many other tactics to increase sales but above tips have been proven to work again and again. Choose one at a time and take action. Good luck.

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