Increase Your “At-Bats” to Increase Your Sales!

Every morning our real estate team practices our scripts and dialogues and reviews everyone’s goals for the day.

One of our team members recently mentioned that his goal for the day is to increase the number of people he speaks to in order to increase results.

That got me thinking.

There are essentially two ways to increase the number of sales you make.  First, you can increase your conversion percentage.  Second, you can increase your “at-bats,” or the number of sales opportunities that you have.  Let’s look at both of these and see how they work in the real world.

Of course, the caveat here is that you must actually track your numbers, as appropriate for your specific sales activity, to determine your conversion percentage.  In order to figure this out, just begin recording the number of sales attempts you make daily and the number of conversions (your end goal, whether that is appointments, contracts, sales, or whatever).

In real estate sales, for example, we track how many people we speak to, how many appointments we schedule and how many signed contracts we obtain.  If you don’t know your numbers, you will never be able to improve them systematically.  OK, let’s say you’ve been tracking your sales activity for a few months and have a good idea of your percentages.  Now it’s time to get more efficient!

Increasing Conversion Percentage

If you want to sell more, you can simply increase your conversion percentage.  In order to increase your conversion percentage, you have to increase your skills.   Regardless of the industry, becoming more efficient means having a higher skill level.  After all, in major league baseball, someone who has a batting average of .300 has better hitting skills than, say, someone who has an average of .250.

Increasing your skills means additional training, practice and improvement.  Perhaps you choose to attend a conference, read books on sales or your industry, learn new strategies or tactics, or do other things to get more efficient at what you do.

To calculate your conversion percentage, simply divide your number of conversions by your number of attempts.  For example, if you routinely speak to 10 people per day and make 2 sales, your conversion ratio would be 20%.

If, after increasing your skills, you raise your conversion percentage to 30%, you will now make 3 sales daily instead of 2!

Increasing Your “At-Bats”

The other option is to simply give yourself more chances for sales by having more opportunities.  In real estate sales, that means talking to more people.  And the reality is that you don’t have to talk to that many more people to achieve far greater results.  Sticking with our major league baseball example, if a player bats .250 but get more at-bats, he will get more hits!

If, for example, you routinely talk to 10 people per day at a 20% conversion rate, and you start speaking to 15  people, you will now make 3 sales per day instead of 2!  Your actual sales “skills” didn’t really improve, but you are selling much more by simply having more “at-bats,” or opportunities for sales.

Increasing Conversion Percentage AND opportunities — WOW!!

What happens if you increase your sales skills and increase your opportunities?  Here’s where it gets really interesting!

In our original example, you had 10 daily sales opportunities and converted 2 of them.  If you increase only your sales skills or opportunities, your results will increase proportionately.  That is, they will increase at the same percentage as your percentage increase in that area.  For example, increase sales skills by 50%, and your results increase by 50%.  Increase opportunities by 50%, and your results increase by 50%.

However, if you now increase your conversion ratio to 30% while at the same time increasing your number of sales opportunities to 15 daily, you will now make 4.5 sales per day.

While you improved by 50% in each area, your overall increase in sales is 125%!

Essentially, your total improvement will increase exponentially if you improve in both areas!

Original blog posted at: http://batsalkingroup.com/increase-your-at-bats-to-increase-your-sales/