Identify The Daily Habits That Drive Sales
Was it the phone calls? The emails? The LinkedIn DMs? Well, it’s hard to tell…
Identifying activities that are revenue-generating is one thing, what takes more discipline is understanding which of those activities drive the best results.
Creating a plan to help identify what your key drivers are will help you better leverage your time, delegate underperforming activities, and level up your sales strategy.
The exercise below helped me exceed my sales quota by 27% last quarter.
Allow me to take you back to a time before social media. Then there was a monopoly on attention by only a few outlets, today we have endless applications vying for a few seconds from our eyeballs.
Our attention spans are decreasing and we face a constant barrage of notifications from all corners of the web.
We are amidst a war for attention
The challenge we face today is being able to meet customers where they are. All the more reason that you need a plan in place to be able to crack the code. Not to mention that with the increasing availability of software and SaaS companies. It is becoming easier for buyers to find a solution that checks all of their boxes.
So, how do you start?
The 3x10 Method
Tracking your sales activities is a great place to start, here is a simple framework to follow that will help you identify your key revenue-driving activities.
- Pick 3 revenue-generating activities that have proven to work for your niche (these could be LinkedIn DMs, cold emails, and cold calling).
2. Keep yourself accountable to perform 10 reps daily for each of those activities for the next month.
3. Compile data for your conversion rates, average opportunity size, and opportunity quality.
With data to back your results, you can iterate your outreach strategy to ensure that you are maximizing the highest and best use of your time. The idea is just a framework, so if you want to up the outreach to 3x20 or 3x30 that will only give you more data (and sales) in the end.
I am writing about this topic more in-depth in next week’s issue of my newsletter RevShare, where I write weekly about all things crushing your quota, and taking the guesswork out of your sales strategy.
Now, onto how this helped me build a client base.
Results
While I was developing the territory I cover for the startup I work at, the 3x10 Method was crucial for me to determine which messaging landed best with my ideal client profile. A normal day looked more like 3x30 which will help you build up your prospect pipeline even faster.
While going through the exercise I determined my connection and conversion ratio for each outreach method throughout the month. With 20 working days in the month, this led to 600 data points for each method that I tracked the results of through Salesforce.
First, let’s look at how often I was able to connect with a live prospect.
Connection Ratio (response from prospect)
- LinkedIn: 5%
- Cold Email: 1.5%
- Cold Call: 7%
From here, it is important to note that my conversion rate is based on the number of times I connected with a prospect. The idea is to boil this down to the most effective strategy for time spent on each repetition.
Conversion Ratio
- LinkedIn: 15%
- Cold Email: 10%
- Cold Call: 25%
I found that cold calling was the main driver for me to drive sales results, followed by LinkedIn DMs. That doesn’t mean I won’t ever send a cold email again. However, I have taken steps to delegate that responsibility to better optimize my time.
This exercise helped me exceed my revenue quota by 27% last quarter and was a big part of that increase. Try it for yourself and let me know what you find out!
If you want to hear more about optimizing your sales, and how to delegate underperforming activities. I am dropping a newsletter all about this on Wednesday, join other founders and sales professionals on RevShare so you don’t miss that issue.
Thank you for reading, see you in the next one!
BR
