I absolutely loved this recent post by Copyblogger. As someone who took piano lessons for over eight years, I’ve played my fair share of Bach minuets, and hearing about the sheer amount of effort he put into creating his music inspired me.
And I think there’s a lesson to be learned here that’s eminently applicable to sales:
“Researchers concluded that the rate of [musical composition] hits to misses was pretty constant between major and minor composers. The truly great composers produce more masterpieces than the others, mainly because they produced more work overall.”
Change “musical composition” to “prospects,” and “masterpieces” to “sales” and suddenly we’re on to something.
You want to know one of the secrets of the top sales people? The agents in the “20 percent” category of the “80/20 Rule of Sales” (i.e., “80 percent of all sales are generated by 20 percent of the reps”)?
They simply have more deals running at the same time.
Obviously, if you can close a higher percentage of your deals in the pipeline, you’ll make more money too. But statistically, there’s a limit to how high this number can go. In our experience, even our best sales reps only close between 10 and 20 percent more deals than average, or about three out of every twenty opportunities.
Sure, this can be significant—but in most cases the bigger difference is that the higher producers simply have bigger pipelines than their counterparts. They have more deals going through the process.
It’s simple, right? Two sales reps, both closing 20 percent of their deals. But one has 15 deals in the pipeline, one has six.
Who’s going to generate more revenue?
I don’t want to turn this post into shameless self-promotion, but we’ve been saying for years at InsideSales.com that one of the biggest ways a sales team can increase sales and drive revenues is by putting more prospects into the pipeline with outstanding Lead Management practices.
If you changed literally nothing else about your sales organization’s performance, other than to put three additional opportunities a month in each rep’s pipeline, what would it do to your sales bottom line?
Bach produced greatness because he had talent, but he also gave himself thousands of opportunities to be great. Outstanding sales reps close more deals, but a lot of the time it’s only because they give themselves more chances to do it.
CATEGORIES: Inside Sales, Inside Sales Best Practices, Lead Management, Lead Response Management
TAGS: CRM, Lead Management, Sales Best Practices, Sales Development, Sales Management
SHARE:
4 Comments
-
I like the theory mentioned here and the call to action at the end. Nicely done.
It’s all about the hustle. The more business you have in the pipeline, the more you will close. Maybe not on percentages, but on volume. The minute you stop, you’ve lost your forward momentum and you’re at risk of ending up dead in the water.
Better to ride that wave then dig out of that hole.
Gonna share this one with a friend. He’s just getting into sales and I think it will do him good to see that the difference between top closers and average is maybe 10-20% and lots of leads to work.
-
Brian,
I was really surprised to find that our top sales reps really don’t close that much higher a percentage of their deals. We always hear the stories about the “super sales rep” that’s closing 60, 70, 80 percent of their deals (and I’m sure they’re out there somewhere), but they’re an extreme-far-right-outlier-on-the-bell-curve type of a sales rep.
The difference our top sales reps have figured out is that they know how keep their pipelines full. They get more direct referrals, they target prospects for longer-term sales (i.e., they don’t give up after the first two or three “No’s” and use a polite, but persistent drip marketing campaign).
-
Excellent comparison. I know that Bach in particular wasted no time. If I remember right, he once spent about a month in jail. During that time he wrote over 46 pieces of music.
-
I agree with you Steve! The 80/20 Rule of Sales has been around for decades; longer than we can remember. Increasing our prospects is certainly an easy answer. There will always be obstacles and hindrances in closing deals but prospects must always be added. Hardwork combined with creativity and resourcefulness will surely boost lead generation. http://bit.ly/ayeen
