The Reason You Produce Inconsistent Sales Results

Producing consistent results in sales is difficult. Opportunities can die due to reasons beyond your control. You can lose deals that you expected to win. And some deals may not turn out to be as good as you expected them to be.

One of the main reasons you produce inconsistent sales results has nothing to do with any of the reasons listed above. It has to do with a lack of prospecting.

Consistency Is Key

Here are some easy numbers with which to illustrate this point and that you can model.

Let’s say you schedule 3 new sales calls with prospective customers in week one. In week two or three—if you have gained the commitment you needed during these sales calls—you should have 2 or 3 future sales calls already on the books.

In week two, you schedule another 3 new sales calls. Plus, you already have a couple sales calls from week one. If you schedule you next meeting before you leave these sales calls, you will have banked 2 or 3 more calls for week three or week four.

In week three, you are consistent enough with your prospecting to schedule 3 more sales calls. You already have 4 to 6 other sales calls to make on the prospects that you had a first call with during weeks one and two. You are gaining momentum. You get the idea that the sales calls you make in one week are future sales calls.

At some point (let’s assume a 90-day sales cycle), you start producing consistent wins. You might not have a new win every week, but they do start piling up because you have been so consistent about prospecting, gaining commitments, and following your sales process.

How to Dig Yourself Into a Massive Hole

Salespeople that take days off of prospecting often end up taking weeks off. One week turns into two weeks, and two weeks turns into months of no prospecting. The guilty parties who take time off from prospecting are often salespeople who create big opportunities and sit on them like a mother hen waiting for them to hatch, overconfident that they will win and doing no prospecting in the meantime.

Because no prospecting was done in one week, there are no 2nd appointments in week two. The failure to prospect in week two means that there are no new sales calls and no 2nd calls on prospects in week three. At the 90-day mark, there are no new clients being won because no prospecting was done a few months early. Not prospecting for weeks and months is how you dig yourself a deep hole from which it is damn near impossible to extricate yourself.

It’s the law of the farm. You plant in spring, and you reap in fall. The law is unforgiving and punishes those who don’t follow it, even when they are ignorant of the law.

The reason you produce inconsistent sales results is because you are inconsistent in your prospecting.