Why Every Small Business Needs a Sales “Fitbit”

One of the hardest choices facing small business leaders is “how much time do I spend on activity X” when there are so many hats you have to wear, and so many things to get done. This combined with the awkwardness, anxiety, and often lack of experience in sales that a lot of us have when suddenly responsible for a whole business's sales efforts can cause both paralysis and a lot of burst efforts when revenue starts to look a little thin.

Here's a sales truth: It's a numbers game! What often sets successful small businesses apart isn't necessarily that their work or products are vastly superior, or that they're exceptionally brilliant. It's that they've embraced the way of the turtle… 'slow and steady wins the race' — with a consistent focus on growth over time. (See the “hard sales truths” section below for more on why this is such a competitive advantage) Growing your business is similar to focusing on physical health. Just like you need to eat well, move more, and create healthy habits over time for lasting results (rather than trying a quick-fix diet), sustainable business growth comes from consistent, strategic efforts.

At the root of these wins is a fundamental necessity: accountability to your goals. You set a goal, measure your progress towards it, and keep making tweaks and experimenting to find what works for you, being honest about what doesn’t. Ok great, but what exactly am I measuring, and what are the tweaks I’m making? Enter… the growth Fitbit for your business.

Questions tracking data can answer

While there are a million metrics you could be looking at, and another million and half sales books with opinions on “the perfect blend” of metrics, this discussion all misses the point. What you want to do is focus on answering questions, not looking at metrics. Let’s start out by answering these two questions:

1. How much growth stuff am I really doing per week?
2. Is what I’m doing for growth working or effective?

If you answer these two questions week after week you’ll be able to answer these followup questions with little effort as well:

1. How long does it take for my sales efforts to bear fruit/result in growth?
2. Is what I’m doing effective and should I make tweaks or optimizations?

Those are often some hard questions to answer, but soon they won’t be for you!

Answering the question: How much growth stuff am I doing?

Let’s start by measuring the activities you invest in each week to create and build relationships with your community of potential buyers. Let’s focus on data that you can readily and easily collect. We’ll add a little future value to this data by bucketing/categorizing the types of people we’re building relationships with as well, so we can better adjust our tactics later. The key thing we want to understand is how much effort you are putting into meeting new people, building relationships with folks you already know, and proactively engaging with potential buyers so that you are in the right place when a sales opportunity emerges.

# of outbound (sent) communications sent, broken down by category:

• New people contacted - Reaching out to new people to see if they have sales potential (are they a “lead” in sales parlance)
• Existing people with sales potential (Leads) - Reaching out to folks you think have sales potential for a second + time with a focus on discovering near term sales opportunities
• Boosters/Supporters - Nurture the relationship and look for opportunities where a booster or supporter might be generous enough to share your content or introduce you to their network.

# of new contacts added to CRM - Are you growing your community of potential buyers?

• Folks with sales potential - Leads for selling work
• Boosters/Supporters - Help me expand my network & meet new people, their networks are super valuable to you
• Partners - Collaborative sales friends that collaborate on opportunities discovered that need services or solutions beyond what each partner individually offers.

How to use this data

1. Create a baseline - what are you doing weekly right now over a month?
2. Identify your current goal based on where your current sales are at:

• My sales are good right now, keep the baseline
• My sales need work: I want to improve on my baseline by 50% per week
• My sales are stalled: I want to reach specific higher numbers: 20 new people contacted per week, 40 potential people to contact researched and added to my “to contact list” per week

3: Set up an automated weekly activity report of your metrics and schedule a 15-minute meeting to review it. This will help you stay accountable.

Answering the question: Are my tactics and approach effective?

The effectiveness of our outreach is easy to judge when we compare the outreach we performed to potential buyers and the number of opportunities for sales we discovered, and ultimately won or lost. You can’t control when a buyer has budget, where they are in their own buying cycle, or any number of other factors that lead to when a sale closes, but you CAN and SHOULD do your best to maximize having a positive relationship with that person and being top of mind and in conversation with them when they are ready to buy.

# of inbound (received) communications, broken down by category

• Folks with sales potential (Leads)
• Boosters/Supporters (Help me expand my network & meet new people)
• Partners (Collaborative sales, where opportunities discovered in each other's networks can be collaboratively pursued)

# of meetings scheduled from outreach

# of opportunities discovered. (potential well defined sales deals with a known closing date)

# of opportunities by qualification/pursuit stage, where you might define the stages like:

• Disqualified (not really an opportunity after investigation)
• Delayed/Future (desire exists, but is far off in closing date)
• Opportunity Identified (You discovered something to send them a proposal for)
• Proposal submitted (drafted something and sent it over for their review)
• Negotiation (working on price/scope stuff)
• Won! (yay!)

Should you worry if you have a down week in effectiveness? No! Sales closing can be highly variable in its distribution, and a sale delayed from one week to another is to be expected and no big deal. This data will tell you how effective things are when viewed monthly or quarterly vs weekly, but weekly can be great in certain situations for reporting on things like “how did my webinar impact on the fence buyers?”

How to use this data

1: Create a baseline - What does my current engagement look like, and what kind of tangible sales opportunities am I discovering from that?

2: Evaluate your tactics:

• Am I engaging with a lot of folks who don’t have sales potential (aren’t leads) and I don’t think are even boosters/supporters? Maybe I need to evaluate how I’m targeting customers?
• Am I meeting leads but I’m not generating opportunities from those meetings? Maybe I need to evaluate my pitch & service offering? (Price is wrong, it’s too hard to understand, the value proposition is hidden.
• Opportunities aren’t moving from stage to stage, things feel stalled? Maybe I need to examine how I’m engaging with opportunity folks, am I being proactive and pushy enough? Do I need to make my contracting/buying process lower friction?

3: Conduct some experiments! There aren’t “ohh just do this” answers for sales, but what there are a lot of are opportunities for optimization and iterative improvement in your process. Identifying where things are getting hung up and making sure you focus your energy on those places will yield improvements.

Hard truths about growth as a small business

You don’t need to be a sales professional to succeed, but you do need to develop this skillset to a point where you can sustain your business yourself, or grow the business to a point where you can hire a pro. Build your sales engine incrementally and over time and don’t get sucked into over-investing in a “perfect sales infrastructure.” This is going to mean that you rarely have the perfect tools, and that you should focus on buying solutions that you can use 85% of the functionality today with, not buy “best in class” tools you hope to grow into over time.

Most people you meet aren’t ready or able to immediately buy whatever you are selling or offering.

• Only three (3) percent of your market is actively buying at any given time. And another 40% are ready to start. The rest won’t buy no matter what you do.
• Just two (2) percent of sales are made on first contact. Three (3) % are made on the second, 5% on the third, 10% on the fourth, and 80% on the fifth to twelfth contact. This emphasizes the importance of nurturing prospective clients throughout the sales process.

Most people in your network aren’t ever going to buy something from you. However… they might know someone who could be a buyer. You need to find kind, considerate, and empathetic ways to engage these folks vs just ignore them.

• As a small business, you aren’t selling to the whole world, they’ve never heard of you and aren’t going to talk to you. You are selling to your network of connections.
• Boosters & supporters own networks are the best way for you to market and connect with people who can become part of your network of connections.
• Getting your boosters & supporters to post and market you to their networks is extremely valuable.

Most relationships take multiple touch points & interactions to develop. Hey wait do you mean just like real life!???? So don’t get discouraged or give up on engaging with someone if it takes multiple efforts. I’m shocked by the number of small business people who only write a great potential contact once or twice.

• For example research shows that only 30% of leads respond after the first outreach, but follow-up emails and calls dramatically increase reply rates. For example, sending more than one follow-up email raises your chance of hearing back to 25%, and a first follow-up email can result in a 220% surge in reply rates compared to the initial email.
• It typically takes eight (8!) touchpoints for a lead to convert into a customer, highlighting the importance of a planned, regular cadence rather than sporadic efforts

You have limited time & attention. Time spent creating standard operating processes (the mighty checklist) and some good data record keeping is well worth the investment.

• Learn how to use your CRM effectively to keep track of who you should talk to, about what, and keep statistics and data on what you’ve already done. Trust me it’s really hard to do this in your head for 200-300 people.
• Without a process & structure you’ll always prioritize “new” over “existing” so make sure you work from a process that balances this.
• It’s easy to “get busy” and not realize how inconsistent or unfocused your sales outreach has become, that’s why you need objective data to keep you honest and invested in the weekly grind.
• Wouldn’t it be nice to have a personal assistant who helped organize and prioritize your sales outreach time every week? Your CRM can and SHOULD be this for you. I do a lot of consulting with folks on the nitty gritty of configuring CRMS to do this. It is so overlooked by most small businesses.

Le Terme

As much information as I just threw at you, this just scratches the surface of this topic. But don't fret, just like Rome wasn’t built in a day, becoming not just a small business owner, expert maker and creator, lead worrier, and bill payer, but also a master of sales and growth doesn't happen in just a day. Keep it simple, keep it practical, and above all, focus on developing good habits and you'll quickly improve your business health.