Last year, you gave it your all, right? You did everything you could to perform at your best.
And here we are; it’s mid-February, likely the first quarter of your new fiscal year, and you just received a higher quota. Not just higher…20% higher!
How will you find another 20%?
A big reason people fail to attain goals is because of a feeling of being overwhelmed – and often take that feeling all the way to quitting. A few years ago, I was introduced to a way to think about achieving higher outcomes in a less ominous way – by breaking it down into smaller parts. When you do this, 20% almost seems easy!
How to break down your “big” goal into smaller, achievable parts
Results are a combination of four things:
- Your number of qualified deals multiplied by
- Your deal sizes multiplied
- Your win rates divided by
- Your cycle lengths.
Amazing thing with the math – if you increase your number of qualified deals, your deal sizes and your win rates by just 5% each, then reduce your cycle lengths by 5%, you’ll grow your results by over 20%. Trust me – no matter the numbers, the math always works.
Don’t fret. You can do this. What is 5%?
- If you have twenty qualified deals in a year, it’s adding just one more.
- If your average deal size is $20k, it’s pushing that up to $21k.
- If you win five out of every twenty deals you qualify, it’s winning just one more.
- If your cycle lengths are typically 30 days, it’s shrinking that by 1.5 days.
Achieve all four of those bullets, your growth will be 21%. (trust me…I’ve tried to break the formula. It’s math)
We all know transparency & authenticity is what we “should” be doing in sales, but the data & brain science behind it shows that it actually contributes mightily to every one of these metrics.
Slight tweaks to your prospecting efforts, like making every prospecting outreach personalized, valuable and void of a sales pitch will drive up your number of opportunities. Practicing more transparent positioning, presenting and negotiation techniques will without question drive up deal sizes, make it increasingly difficult for competitors to compete against you, and has been shown to dramatically decrease cycle lengths.
This is your year…you’ll be squashing that 20% higher quota like a grape.
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