If you’re not analysing your sales and don’t know what worked (and what didn’t!), you can’t learn.
If you can’t learn, you can’t improve.
Remember and track historic data.
It could be six months between contacting a prospect. With everything else going on in your life, you can’t hope to expect you’ll remember all the things you needed to remember about what you talked about in your first conversation.
Imagine you called your bank and they greeted you by asking you how little Holly was getting on! (If you had a child named Holly) You’d be blown away by the personal service, and you have the opportunity to wow people like that if you record that key information.
Speaking of it being six months between contacting a prospect, would you remember to call someone back in 6 months without having written a reminder in a calendar? 44% of salespeople only follow up once, so by planning and following up on future contacts, you’ll be ahead of half of the competition already.
We’ve mentioned CRM’s before and this is what you should utilise them for. But if you don’t have a CRM, this becomes even more important.
Analyse. Learn. Improve.
When combined with your pre-call planning, post-call reports can also help you to review and analyse your own performance. Whilst your pre-call plans can outline your objectives and how you hope to achieve them, your post-call reports should document the outcomes.
This will leave you to able to draw conclusions with tangible results.
You can measure and track your performance from conversation to conversation, but once you have enough data, you can begin to see the bigger picture and draw better conclusions.
This means you can begin to see what is and isn’t working for you. Without that, you’re just stabbing in the dark.
Key Points to Consider
Document every sales conversation. You’ll have an archive far more detailed than your brain will remember. You’ll be able to analyse your own performance with clarity and representatively.
Consider getting some CRM software. This will facilitate your post-call reports so you save time and effort doing it yourself. There are some Lite versions of software available for free which will be better than nothing.
Client Feedback, post-call reporting and pre-call planning all feed each other information. Utilise all three to maximise the potential of each.
We have some very innovative products to help you enjoy and develop your selling within business.
Take a moment to check out the Sales Growth Club and our Accelerator programmes or Contact Us to find out more!