How many prospects do you need to talk to before you get one booking?
How many people do you need in attendance to have a $1000 party?
How many parties do you average per week? Per month?
What’s your average party and how can you increase that amount?
How many bookings do you average per party? How can you increase this?
How many prospects do you need to interview before you get a recruit?
How many recruits do you need to sign before you get one new leader?
How many new leaders do you need before you get one great leader?
Many salespeople do no fully understand the importance of finding out their averages in order to improve in certain areas of their business. Tracking yourself in your business can help you find areas that you need to improve and then work on ways to improve your stats. Simple little techniques can have dramatic increases in your business, often with no increase in time or effort. As Jim Rohn says, “When you are new you make up in numbers what you lack in skill.” Once you discover what you need to do you can work to improve each skill to increase your productivity. Here are some simple ways to track yourself that won’t take much time or effort but can go a long way to making you more money!
1. Begin today tracking how many parties you hold each week, each month and each year. During coaching with consultants and leaders most are amazed to discover the difference in the amount of parties they believe they have held and the amount they have actually held. For example, during one call the person I was coaching said she held about 8 – 10 parties each month. I asked her to get her company stats and lets go over them. She went back for 8 months and discovered she actually held an average of 4 -5 parties per month and the most parties she had ever held in a month was 7. After the initial shock she said to me, “I feel like I’m working all the time.” Come to find out she was spending lots of time on things that did nothing to put money in her bank account. A few changes in the way she did things at her parties and she was soon reaching the 8 – 10 parties per month goal she had set for herself.
2. Create a tracking system for your parties on excel or a spreadsheet where you list the number of invitations sent, how many guests attended, how many guests purchased, total sales, how many people booked, how many leads you interviewed for the business opportunity. (These are many of the questions I teach leaders to ask their new recruits in the Blueprint for Mastering Direct Selling Leadership for 6-Figure Income Virtual Bootcamp.) www.karenphelps.com/leadership.html
Using a tracking system for your parties helps you discover areas where you are strong and areas you need to improve in your business. If you have a low party average you need to discover WHY? Is it because there aren’t many people at your parties or is it because a lot of people leave without purchasing? If you are having low attendance and you are not mailing invitations for your hostesses you may want to begin to mail them for 30 days to see if your attendance increases. If you hold party after party with no bookings sooner or later you will be out of business. YOU MUST GET AT LEAST ONE BOOKING FROM EVERY PARTY…NO EXCUSES! So, if you aren’t replacing every booking what do you need to do in order to leave every party with one to three bookings? ( Should try the booking game which is part of the It’s a Party Out There Program www.karenphelps.com/shop.html or www.karenphelps.com/promo.html)
3. Track your Leads. How many people do you need to hand recruiting brochures to get one person to sit down and talk to you about the business. How many people do you need to interview in order to get one signed recruit.Wow, this is an interesting area because a lot of direct sellers misinterpret signing someone up with interviewing someone about the business opportunity. When someone tells me they sign everyone they talk to my initial response is, “you are not talking to enough people.” The late Jim Rohn said even the best recruiters signed an average of 3 – 4 out of every 10 people which is a 30 – 40% close ratio. As I teach in the new Leadership Virtual Bootcamp RECRUITING IS NOT AN ACTIVITY! Prospecting, phone calls and interviews are the activities you do to get a signed recruit. The “signed recruit” is the result of the activities you have done previously. Those are the activities you need to track, leads, follow-up phone calls and interviews. Begin tracking those elements and work to improve in each one and watch your number of new recruits increase as you begin to work on areas where you discover you need to improve. For example, maybe you get a lot of leads at your parties but you don’t actually get many of them to meet with you to talk about the business. You may have to work on your follow-up skills to improve your average.
4. How many recruits do you need on your team to get one leader? Ahhh…many leaders don’t think about this when they are trying to build a direct selling empire. If you promote one leader for every 10 recruits and you want 10 new leaders you know you will need to bring 100 recruits into your team. If you promote one leader for every 20 recruits you’ll need to have 200 recruits to get 10 leaders. Now, if you haven’t been tracking this all along you can go back and get an approximate figure by dividing the number of leaders you have into the number of people in your organization. If you have 500 on your team (yes, for this stat you will need to count active and inactive recruits) and you have 5 leaders then you can pretty much figure that you need to have 100 recruits per leader. BUT, you can improve your average by doing the RIGHT THINGS! You can train your new recruits to begin sponsoring immediately. You can hold a Future Leader Luncheon EVERY month to increase the awareness of the leadership opportunity with your company. When you begin to work RIGHT you will notice you don’t have to WORK HARD to get better results!
So, hopefully I’ve given you some food for thought. I know with today’s technology many direct selling consultants and leaders have access to up-to-the-minute stats with their company which can be a blessing as well as a curse. You have to break everything down as small as you can in order to discover what needs to be improved to increase your averages. Even if your company is keeping track of things for you there are probably many places where you could keep better statistics on yourself and your team AND with little tweaks and changes notice BIG RESULTS! And since I just returned from Vegas, “I’m betting” you can make success in your business happen!!!
