Decide When to Stop Selling

The next step in structuring your sales sounds a bit surprising:  when to STOP selling!  If you’ve missed the previous episodes in this series, please use these links to take the first steps.

Introduction to Structured Selling 

Structuring the Value Proposition 

Test Your Assumptions Before You Launch

Identify Your Target Market 

Launching a campaign is a great way to structure selling.  Today I’ll show you how to give yourself the urgency and accountability to propel you toward success.

After establishing the value proposition and the target market for your campaign, you’re ready to set the start date.  However, too often sales professionals forget to set an end date!  There should be a set time to stop selling a particular target market.  That will give you the urgency and accountability needed to make the calls you’ve set for each day.  Suppose you are targeting pizza shops in your campaign.  During the step of proving your assumptions you can see how much time is required for driving to ten pizza shops in your area.  Depending on the driving time between shops, set your daily goal.  For closer shops, plan to visit ten or fifteen per day.  If some distance is between shops, visit five or six.

Use simple math to set your goal.  If you have two hundred pizza shops within your target market (Identifying your target market) and plan to visit ten per day, then this should be a twenty-day campaign.  Assuming there are about twenty working days in a month, you have a one-month campaign.  You can now set a hard deadline for yourself.  If you decide to start the campaign on the first of the month, then you’ll stop selling on the last day of the month.  Take two days off to plan and set-up the next campaign.  Then launch it in the same way.

By setting start and end dates, you’ll force yourself to move quickly.  You must visit the designated number of businesses per day because your campaign has an end date.  And the next campaign begins within two or three days.  Think of creative ways to track progress and give accountability.

I am a big believer is using technology.  However, there don’t seem to be any great programs for goal setting and tracking yet.  Here is a simple idea which I’ve employed.  Put a big bar chart / thermometer on a large poster board!  If you plan to visit one hundred businesses, have the end date at the top of your chart with the one hundred.  Mark the projected dates to reach specific goals on one side (at 75, 50, etc.)  On the other side, start coloring in the bar and put the date each day.  Even if there is an app which does that, seeing a huge poster board when you walk into your office is motivating.

Make use of simple math and setting an end date to give you urgency and accountability.  Tracking your progress is going to be very helpful as you move forward into the next phase of structuring sales.

Read previous post:  Identify Your Target Market

Identify Your Target Market

Read next post:  How to Make Money After Your Campaign is Over

How to Make Money After Your Campaign is Over