Whether you are running your own company or just a sales employee, we’re all familiar with the fact that we have to increase our sales almost every year, just to keep our business alive or to keep our jobs.

However, many people depend a “miracle” to increase their sales. This could be a new account, a new project or some new lucky unforecasted sales just dropping in. A few will work alot harder, not focusing in any particular area, and yet others will focusing on increasing their own sales skills, hoping to become a more effective sales person.

While all these will work to some extent, most people forget that sales is a numbers game. The more potential customers you see, the higher the potential of increasing your sales. However, number of customers is just one aspect of the numbers game. there are really a few major areas. Let’s take a look at some of these.

Sales Revenue is a function of all or some of the following :

1. The number of sales calls or customers you see per day (or per month or per year) - A
2. Your average hit rate or conversion rate - B
3. Your average size per order - C

Let’s take a look at a hypothetical example. Assuming your sales revenue is affected by all of the above. Then lets assume that you make on average 3 sales calls a day, have a closing rate of 25% and an average order size of $5k. What does this work out to  as far as sales revenue is concerned? Well 3 sales call per day works out to 15 sales calls per week (5 working days per week and 20 working days per month) and 60 customers seen per month. Out of the 60 customers you close 25% which means 15 sales orders averaging $5k each. This works out to $75k per month or sales. And if you consider that in a year, there are 12 months, this will work out to $900,000 per year of orders.

Now let’s assume that you were able to incrementally increase all three areas of the above, by working harder to increase the number of sales calls and taking up some sales courses to increase your hit rate and average sales per order. Now let’s assume that you worked a little harder each day by getting up a little earlier and staying at work a little later and was able to increase your average sales call per day to 4. Also the selling skills course you took and put into practise increased your hit rate from 25% to 30%. You also learnt some upselling tactics which enabled you to increase your average order size from $5k to $5.5k. What would the sales revenue per year increase to?

Doing the usual mathematics, 4 sales call per day works out to 20 calls per week and 80 calls per month. You closed 30% of the orders and this works out to 24 orders. At $5.5k per order, your monthly revenue would now be $132,000 and your yearly sales revenue will now be $1.584M, a 76% increase!

Don’t you think that is impressive? Well that’s not all… assuming you were getting a1% commission in the past. With a sales of $900k, your yearly commission would be $9,000. However, just imagine if you were able to convince your bosses that if you were to be able to exceed $1M in sales, they should increase your sales commission by 10% to 1.1%. Now with your new sales revenue at $1.584M, your sales commission will be a hefty $17,424… an increase of almost 94% or close to double!

So there you see it. Working harder in a particular area or improving your sales skills may improve one of these areas but not all of it. However, if you were to just work on incrementally increasing all areas just by a small margin, the power of compounding works for you and allow you to almost double your sales commission.

The good news is that in the hypothetical example above, we only use 3 areas of influence on your final sales revenue. Depending on the nature of your work, you should be able to come up with at least 5 areas of potential improvement where you can work on.

Looking at it this way, doubling your sales isn’t all that tough, is it?

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