When I broke into sales in 1986, Alex, my first training instructor looked down at my wide-eyed baby face and trembling shoulders, and said, “Kid, if you only remember one thing about our time together, remember this formula:  Prospects + Calls + Presentations = Sales”.

I’d accidentally finished college, after accidentally finishing high school, and now accidentally landed a sales job selling copiers for Lanier.  After Alex cut me loose to work in the field, I spent my days knocking on the doors of businesses, performing copier demonstrations, and closing sales.  Motivated by the fear of failure, Alex’s formula was always the most important weapon in my sales arsenal.

In the 1990s, selling techniques like Alex’s became passé.  Soft selling became radical chic for the sales consultant crowd who came to power using intimidating words such as “strategy”, “paradigm”, “value proposition”, and “convergence”.  Nodding my head and adopting the lexicon, year after year, I rang up successful results — first as an individual contributor, then later, when I accidentally became a sales manager.   But, I never stopped using Alex’s formula, or coaching those who worked for me to adopt his methodology.  As a nod to the times, I did give the formula a name: “sales rigor”.

Today I manage a $10-million sales team going into the third year of existence, staffed mostly by twenty-somethings in their first or second jobs out of college.  Our target audience is the thousands of convention exhibitors who need trade show products and services, e.g.: rental exhibit booths, labor services, shipping, graphics, etc.  My team makes hundreds of telephone calls each week, discovers the needs of exhibitors, and presents our company’s solutions.  Last year we grew our year-over-year business 164% during the “recession”.   And we did it by adapting Alex’s rigorous formula for today’s market demands:

• PROSPECTS:  Using Salesforce.com, our company’s customer relationship management tool (CRM), we organize sales “campaigns” that keep a steady, full funnel of prospects for our account executives to call.
• CALLS:  account executives are held accountable for making calls each week and for recording their activity in the CRM.  When their efforts fall short of expectations, they’re expected to catch up.  Continued failure to catch up results in their calls getting assigned to other account executives.
• PRESENTATIONS:  account executives are expected to meet objectives for qualified leads each week.  Qualified leads are obtained by speaking with exhibitors, presenting custom-designed solutions, and eventually proposals.
• SALES:   account executives who meet their commitments and rigorously follow the previous steps in the formula find they must apply very little effort to closing business.  Moreover, managers who use sales rigor to monitor the previous steps in the formula have to terminate few account executives for poor selling performance.

Try adapting Alex’s formula to your sales efforts.  You may accidentally discover it works for you too.

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