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Using a Monthly Sales Call Planner

To help you plan and manage your selling activities, use a monthly sales call planner. It motivates you to think about where you want to invest your limited sales resources—your in-person sales calls. You use this sales tool to plan your sales calls one month in advance. (This tool can be found as an Excel spreadsheet at www.measuremax.com.)

You decide how many sales calls you need to make to practice account or opportunity management effectively. No magic number exists other than what you think you require to be successful. You are not scheduling specific dates to visit, but rather specific numbers of planned sales calls. You can also use the monthly sales call planner to solicit advice from your peers or sales management team, but before your month begins, not after. Another benefit of the planner is that it lets you evaluate how well you know who the different players are and their role in the decision-making process.

A monthly sales call planner should have the following format:

• Account. The name of the account you are seeing that month.

• Opportunity Name. The name of the opportunity.

• Contact. The name of the person you plan on seeing. List all the decision makers you think are in important in that account, regardless of whether you plan on seeing him. You can then reuse your monthly sales planner by saving it as the next month's planner and updating it.

• Position. The title of the contact.

• Planned, In-Person Sales Calls/Month. Self-explanatory.

• Actual. The number of sales calls you actually made.

• Current Phase. In which Measurable Phase did you make the sales call?

• Total Planned Calls. Self-explanatory.

• Nonscheduled Reactive Calls. The number of sales calls you make on a reactive basis rather than on a planned one. Try to make sure your reactive calls (such as customer requests, unexpected bids or opportunities that surface, and customer problems that arise) are less than a third of your total sales calls. It's difficult to react your way to sales superstar status.

• Total Monthly Calls. Self-explanatory.

Set Limits on Sales Calls to Increase Productivity

Another way to improve productivity is to limit the number of sales calls in each of the MPs. In a given sales opportunity, decide how many calls you are willing to invest without obtaining an MPC in each selling phase. When you reach a certain limit, it is time to call it quits. Otherwise, hope springs eternal—along with wasted efforts.

Setting limits provides an objective and measurable mechanism to motivate you to identify and handle potential hinges or smokescreens. Limits also trigger create-and-wait responses sooner so you pursue more productive and high-return opportunities. As discussed, if you end the sales process at this time, let the customers know why. Also, if possible, explain to them that if certain goals or filters change you can provide them with more benefits and value than they currently receive. Q sheets chart the number of sales calls you make in each MP.

Use a Quote Inventory to Increase Productivity

A quote inventory is easy to create. The quote inventory encompasses the law of diminishing returns. Every MP 3: Cement Solution quote (proposal) you add over a certain number of outstanding ones, the harder it becomes for you to handle them proficiently. Therefore, set a maximum number on your MP 3: Cement Solution quotes. Typically, salespeople can effectively manage between eight and fifteen quotes. Do not count proposals made outside of the MeasureMax process (public bids) in your numbers, just the MP 3 ones that occur within it. You know public bid outcomes most often depend on low price to win the sale.

When you exceed this limit, take one quote out of inventory and insert it in an inactive file. Bring the oldest quote first back into inventory when you fall below your maximum level. Purchase orders and, regrettably, lost sales provide room to add quotes into your inventory.

Question why your MP 3: Cement Solution proposals are not sales yet. When the agreed-upon budget or start dates arrive without purchase orders, ask customers why. After all, the MPC 3: Solution Confirmed supposedly validated that your proposed solutions met their conditional commitments. As a preventative measure, remember that the stronger the measurable benefits are in MP 3, the more likely MPC 4 will occur at the same time.

Set up a quote log to track your outstanding MP 3: Cement Solution proposals by budget and decision dates of the proposals, dollar amounts, and gross margins. Again, Q sheets record this information.

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