Irons in the Fire

Submitted by Mitch Seigel on Wed, 02/01/2012

I heard this term the first time, many years ago, and ever since then, I haven’t stopped using it. I’ve never met a salesperson who sells each prospective client. I’ve seen some who sell 75 - 80%, which is fantastic, but never 100%.....

With that in mind, I remind you that if you don’t have enough irons in the fire, you most likely will not reach your goals. You may have professional goals self imposed if you own your own business, or they may be given to you by a supervisor. You also have personal goals which are determined by how much money you want to make. Making sure you keep on track on both of these paths is extremely important to your success.

So how do you do it? Well it’s a math problem. If you know that you close 50% of every opportunity, then you need double the amount of presentations than the total you need to close. The number of prospects may be even more, because all prospects may not turn into presentations. That’s another number you need to know-out of every ten prospects, how many turn in to presentations?

Now you need to back it out to your goals to determine how many irons you need in your fire. If you’ve owned a company for awhile, or have sold for a company for several years, you can determine the need for prospects based on history. A key factor with this is the turnover you have of customers. If you have 75% of your customers not repeat, that means you need to grow your customer base by 400% to just break even, back at 100% of business.

For example, if you have 100 customers in year one and 75 of them cancel for year two, you need to add the 75 back to break even in the second year. You would also need 150 presentations completed throughout the year to end up with those 75 new accounts or clients. And if you don’t get to present to all of your prospects, you may need well over 200 prospects in the year to end up with 150 presentations.

I hope you see now how important it is to have many irons in the fire. It becomes easier if you think of your own circumstances and write it all down. You may need to work harder at looking for prospects, or it may be that you need to work smarter to get more of them to have you present and then buy.

What are your challenges when it comes to getting irons in the fire through prospecting? I look forward to hearing your comments. Until next time …