We all wish that we could meet prospective clients, have a chat with them and they sign up to work with us. However, successful sales are not always easy to come by for coaches, trainers and consultants.
Becoming better at selling and achieving your sales goals comes with experience. But you can reduce your learning and experience curve if you track your progress.
Let’s take a step back and look at goal setting from a different perspective.
For example, do you ever set personal goals to work your way towards? Say you have a fitness goal where you walk a few kilometres or miles a day and gradually over time work your way up to a daily 30-minute jog.
This is the same for sales. You have a higher chance of reaching your sales goals if you set milestones along the way and also track your progress.
3 Reasons Why Tracking Your Progress Leads to Successful Sales
1. You’re able to monitor progress through your sub-goals
Tracking your progress shows you whether or not you’re on course.
If you have a monthly sales goal:
- You can break it down by week and set weekly sub-goals.
- At the end of each week, you evaluate and see if you’re hitting your targets or not.
- If you’re not hitting your weekly targets, then you need to make a change. It’s much easier to make a change now than wait until the end of the month.
If, for example, your monthly sales goal is to sign up 4 new 1-1 clients per month, you can break it down into weekly goals each Friday. Ideally then, you should sign up 1 new client per week.
This also means that you need to track:
- How many people have you met who meet your ideal client criteria?
- How many sales conversations have you had with the people you met (not everyone you meet will lead to a sales conversation)?
- The number of people who accepted your proposal to work together.
- How many of those who said Yes actually signed up to work with you and paid?
If you keep track of these figures then it will be easy to see where you’re losing prospects. This will indicate the skills you may need to beef up so that you have more successful sales.
2. Increased motivation as you celebrate your milestones
You should celebrate each success along the way because every little milestone you hit gives you added motivation. This in turn helps you gain confidence in your sales skills as you work toward your bigger business goals.
Many people have mindset challenges when it comes to sales. It’s common for self-employed professionals to feel that they’re not good at sales because they don’t have significant results to show for their efforts.
Celebrating every small victory along the way proves to you that this can be done. When you see those first few conversions from prospects to clients, you can easily start to see yourself as a successful salesperson.
Break down your goals into milestones. Keep track of your milestones and celebrate as you achieve them.
3. Figuring out what’s wrong
Not hitting your milestones is an excellent learning activity. Evaluating the unachieved ones will also help you analyze your strategy and figure out where you’re losing prospective clients.
For example, you might see a great deal of traffic to your website and engagement with the content there. However, this is not leading to people purchasing, asking about your services, or wanting to have a sales conversation with you.
In this case, although visitors are spending a great deal of time on your blog or website, they’re not responding to your call-to-action. They’re not making a purchase or taking the next step.
This tells you is that although your web content is relevant to your audience, you’re not getting the conversion for one or more reasons such as:
- Your offer isn’t appropriate for them.
- The navigation is difficult.
- Your call to action is weak.
When the incoming traffic isn’t converting, you can tweak and make small changes to see how it impacts the bottom line.
Make a habit of checking your results so that you figure out what’s not working and plug the leaks in your sales pipeline effectively.
Something to keep in mind…
Your sales goals are not set in isolation. They are part of your overall SMART business goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound goals).
Break these SMART goals into milestones that build incrementally into the bigger goals.
Finally, choose one or a few key metrics to monitor that will tell you whether you’re reaching your goals or not. Work on your milestones daily and keep track weekly, monthly and annually.
If you’re marketing online, make use of the inbuilt analytical tools on websites, blogs and social media platforms. Learn how to use them so that you weed out what’s not working and amplify what’s working.
Want to learn how to turn your prospects into clients?
If you’re a coach, trainer, or consultant and you really want to know how to expertly turn prospects into paying clients, check out our program Kickstart Your Business.
This is a live 12-week group program where I teach you a step-by-step system with learning activities and actual scripts you can use on your own now and in the future.
Through a combination of training, coaching, peer-to-peer accountability, and a private community, you will finally overcome the mindset and physical blocks that keep you from effective selling.
We also have a private members area with amazing resources, bonus learning activities, and templates you can customize for your business.
Join the next group and learn how to turn prospects into clients in a way that feels natural to you.
(Image credit: Pixabay)
