Shifting Focus To Maximize Your Contracts

There’s still two months to hit your sales goals for this year. And while hitting your goals often means qualifying for trips and more revenue for your business, we also know that based on how contracts are written, NOT hitting certain goals will leave bonuses on the table.

This week we encourage you to look at your contracts to find the low hanging fruit, and ways that you can still maximize your contracts for this year.

While maximizing your contracts is a critical part of your first-of-the-year business planning, it often gets lost in the business of taking care of clients and dealing with business issue and opportunities. As you’re planning your fourth quarter push for profit it’s essential to look ahead and, given where your business is today, recalculate the best ways for you to maximize your contracts for the rest of this year.

Regardless of what goals you need to hit to maximize your contracts this year, we suggest the following steps to help you get there:

• Study your contracts and identify your target goals through year end.
• Ensure that you look ahead to vacations, holidays, and how long it will take to move prospects through the pipeline because the last two months have a lot of barriers to overcome. This will help ensure that your goals are more accurate, and you don’t overestimate the amount of time you have to complete those goals.
• Hold a company-wide sales meeting. We’re believers that every employee on your team should be seen as a part of the sales team and this holds especially true now. This means that everyone on your team should not only know what the goals are but should be crystal clear on what they can do to help the team achieve those goals.
• Make your goals visible. This could mean tracking your goals through weekly reports or on a whiteboard. This will help your team see the progress and get excited about reaching the goals.
• Set your goals based on the activity that is needed to achieve the results. You can’t always control your results (people saying yes or no), but you can control your activity. This will help your team feel more in control and less discouraged if the results don’t happen right away.
• Use an agenda with your clients/prospects. The easiest clients to convert are the ones that know and trust you. Using an agenda that creates opportunities to discuss other products and services with clients or prospects that you’re already meeting with increases your ability to close. Check out this Insight for an example.
• Ask for referrals. Since people who know and trust you will increase your ability to close a sale, referrals will help you reach those goals.
• Create a top ten list that is updated weekly for the products/services that you and your team need to sell to hit your goals for maximizing your contracts. While overall you should implement systems and procedures to consistently hit your goals, right now you need to shift the focus to low hanging fruit.

While this Insight focuses specifically on year end, it’s important to remember that maximizing your contracts is smart business all year long. It’s about understanding your opportunities to increase net profit and not just revenue.