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Allow me to introduce you to a tried and true warehouse operations technique that can also work beautifully in sales.

Have you ever heard the term Cycle Inventory or Perpetual Inventory? It’s a concept used by companies that have a large warehouse of goods that require a high degree of inventory accuracy.

Let’s say a company has 25,000 items that they stock in inventory. Instead of doing the inventory all at once they break it up into pieces and do a little each day.

If they wanted to inventory their entire warehouse every six months they would only need to inventory 192 items per day using this technique. They make it a manageable task.

Prospecting is no different. If we Cycle Prospect or Perpetual Prospect we can take a time consuming and challenging chore and break it into much smaller pieces. At the end of a month, quarter or year we can achieve some remarkable numbers without ever having to binge prospect.

Here are the steps to make this happen:

1. Calculate how many new customers we want to add in a month.
2. Calculate what our personal closing average is (i.e., for every 100 prospects we contact how many turn into customers?).
3. Divide the number of new customers desired by our closing average.
4. Take this number and divide by 22 (the average number of work days in a month).
5. This number represents how many prospects we need to contact each work day in order to achieve our new customer goals for the month.

Example:

Jill wants to add five new customers each month and her closing average is 10%. She takes the number of desired new customers (five) and divides by her closing average (.10) and the result is 50. Next she’ll divide 50 by 22 to see how many prospects she’ll need to contact each work day, and the result is 2.3. By contacting just 2.3 prospects each day Jill can realistically expect to add five new customers a month.

With discipline and time this technique can break down a sales chore into reasonable chunks and yield nice long term returns.

© 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Tags: habits, Prospecting, prospects

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