How to Track and Improve Sales Performance
Do you know just how many sales your staff is bringing in every month? What about every week or even every day? If you don't have these figures, you're not keeping proper tabs on your incoming revenues.
There are three benefits to tracking sales performance with your staff:
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You'll be able to monitor daily sales activities easily.
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You'll be able to improve the results of each salesperson at your club.
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You'll be able to improve sales activity and results by testing and implementing new ways to sell club memberships.
There are two components that make up a successful sales tracking system: “the daily worksheet” and “the three-step sales development process.” Here's how to implement these components and integrate a sales tracking system.
The Daily Worksheet
Use the daily worksheet with your salespeople to track their daily performance. As the name implies, the daily worksheet requires each staff member to record three types of activities each day: daily appointments, sales made each day and follow-up calls made each day.
I've found that the three keys to selling more memberships are to make calls, make calls, make calls. If each salesperson at your club has 10 appointments scheduled each day, you can rest assured that you'll be enrolling some new members on those days.
The Three-Step Sales Development Process
The three activities that make up the sales development process are innovation, quantification and orchestration.
Innovation means finding new and more effective ways to sell memberships. If you're currently asking prospective members, “How long have you been thinking about starting an exercise program?” and you find that by asking that question in a different way you get better results, then you begin using the new question during your sales presentations.
There are three questions to ask before you try a new sales innovation. How many people come into the club each day? What questions do you ask them? How many sales do you make each day?
The answers to these three questions will give you an initial benchmark for measuring and comparing future results based on the innovations you try.
Quantification means documenting the impact of the innovations you try. Did the new question work any better than the old question? If so, how much better?
Here are four questions to use when quantifying incoming calls or telephone inquiries. How many people call on the phone each day to inquire about memberships? What do your salespeople say to the callers? How many appointments result from telephone inquiries? How many callers end up joining?
Review these initial numbers with each salesperson during your weekly meetings. Then have each salesperson try a different script with each call that comes in and review the results during your next meeting. This process of innovating and quantifying will motivate your salespeople because they'll be getting better results during each subsequent week as they improve their selling skills.
Orchestration means implementing new strategies after they've been proved to work — and using them every single time. When you identify the question that produces the best result, you and your salespeople should use that question during every presentation.
The effective implementation of the three-step sales development process will provide you with absolutely predictable ways of producing consistent results every single time a prospective member visits your club.
Jim Collins is an owner and the general manager of Waterfront Fitness in Juno Beach, Fla. He can be reached at (561) 625-3011.