Sales Mistakes CEOs Make

Why do otherwise successful business leaders struggle to grow sales in today’s rapidly changing environment?

Are you the CEO or Business Owner whose company does great work? Has happy clients? Gets new business regularly from referrals? Yet remain frustrated with your ability to drive sales growth for your organization?

While your typical sales organization correctly believes that sales is a numbers game; that’s not really accurate. As always; sales success is a numbers game, but the numbers have changed.

If you adhere to the old rules, you will be lost in a sea of “peddlers” all claiming that their product or service is superior to anything else on the market. If, on the other hand, you learn the keys to building a proven and repeatable sales process, you’ll have a distinct and permanent competitive advantage.

To address this our team developed the New Math of Sales Excellence^®. We realized that there are five, and only five metrics that have to be managed in order to optimize the top line. They are:

The number of first meetings in the calendar, at all times;

The dollars per transaction;
The conversion ratio of leads to orders;
The length of the sales cycle; and
FTE or available selling time

Here is the New Math of Sales Excellence^® expressed as an algebraic equation:

# First Meetings X $/Opp X Close %

———————————————- X FTE = Sales Revenue

Length Of Sales Cycle

To some this might seem obvious but I see over and over again that most businesses do not address each of these specifically and together.

One way to think of this is that if you want to grow sales by 50% and you only focus on lead generation, then you need to generate a lot of new leads (100% increase in new leads if you have a 50% closing ratio).

But if we make a small improvement in each area (say 8%) then you can hit the same 50% revenue growth target. As everyone knows, an 8% increase is much easier than a 100% increase.

But how do you do it? How do you grow leads, grow the value of each deal, improve closing ratios, shorten the sales cycle, or create more selling time?

One way is to focus exclusively on these five areas and ignore all the other “stuff”. With focus and trial and error you will learn what works for your business.

Or even easier … attend our workshop “The New Math Of Sales Excellence” this June. We’ve partnered with American Executive Centers to bring the workshop to all six of their Philadelphia area locations. Join us and we’ll show you specific strategies to tackle each of these five keys.

Sales is still a numbers game; but the key metrics have changed!

The workshop is free, just register here:

https://www.akela-partners.com/about/events/newmathofsalesexcellence