Business Priorities: Sales Appointments and Final Proposals

Check your business priorities to determine your overall business strengths and weaknesses. The previous post focused on leads. Let's talk about appointments.

Leads

Appointments

Sales Appts and Final Proposals
The number of sales appointments you go on per month, or need to go on per month, will vary greatly depending on your business and your function. If you're a salesman then the sales appointment, proposal and asking for the order is an everyday task. In the home improvement industry, you've got to ask for the order when you're with the customer so you often eliminate the proposal stage as a separate stage.

If you're a consultant then the challenge is juggling sales appointments with the projects you're working on. How many sales appointments should you go on each month? It depends on how much money you need to earn and how large your current client base is.

Let's try to arrive at a simple formula you can adapt. For this scenario, let's say you're running or helping with a small company and you get to determine the company's projected income for the year, and ultimately, the income you need to take home.

You want the company to earn "x" dollars per year. Let's say $500,000. Is that from one product or one service or is it a combination of small orders and large orders.

Then ask yourself, "what's your current average order size?" Is it $10,000 to do a complete web site, for example. Or if you're a restaurant, is your average tab about $15 - $20?

Project in the next 6 months to 12 months, how many "average" size orders do you see maintaining? Do you have repeat business or a solid client base? If so, count on that income and then subtract it from the $500,000 total.

So let's say you want to make $500,000, and let's say you have a current customer base of $300,000. So now you need enough sales to generate $200,000 more. You might even want to be conservative and count on losing 10% of the $300,000 through attrition or unfavorable circumstances.

If your average order is $10,000 and you need to earn $200,000 you need 20 sales.

How many sales appointments do you need to make 20 sales? It depends on how strong a referral base you have and how well you close sales. If you're closing percentage is 20% then you'll need 100 sales appointments spread over the course of a year. So that's about 9 per month or 2 per week.

Go back one step and ask "how many leads do you need to generate 100 appointments?"

Tailor the number to fit your specific situation, and use the total number of monthly sales appointments you need to prioritize your schedule.

Proposals Accepted
Projects underway
Projects Completed
Invoices Sent (Billings)Invoices Collected