How To Get Better At Sales: Working Hard vs. Working Smart
“Sales is a numbers game.” When you hear this, you probably think about revenue. So do most salespeople!
It’s true—sales is all about revenue. It’s the number that matters the most—the number that gets reported to investors, keeps the lights on at the office, and pays your commission checks.
But the quantifiable success of a salesperson actually starts way before revenue, with what most sales leaders call “activity metrics,” a.k.a., “hard work metrics.”
Activity metrics.
These metrics show what a sales rep is actually spending their time doing on a daily basis. Not the results, but the activities that lead to the results.
“Control the controllables” is an oft-used expression in sales offices. Activity metrics are the “controllables.”
You can’t always control how many prospects pick up your phone calls or how many deals you close, but you can ALWAYS control these activity metrics, i.e., how hard you’re working:
- # of outbound calls made
- # of inbound calls picked up
- # of conversations
- # of hours on the phone
- # of emails sent
- # of text messages sent
- # of meetings scheduled
- # of demos or pitches
- # of proposals sent
Click here to read more from HubSpot about other common metrics in sales.
More activity results in more revenue.
More calls lead to more time on the phone.
More time on the phone leads to more demos.
More demos lead to more proposals sent.
More proposals sent lead to more revenue.
But more ACTIVITY also means more WORK.
Working harder.
When you’ve already made 70 dials on the day and it’s 4pm and you want to shut your computer, making those 10 extra dials will lead to more revenue.
When you’ve already called every prospect in your pipeline before lunch, calling them all a second time in the afternoon will lead to more revenue.
When you’re counting down the last minutes of your lunch break, heading back to your desk early and squeezing in an extra few dials will lead to more revenue.
When you’re calling from the west coast office and your east coast prospect wants to schedule a meeting for 6pm your time on a Friday when your day is supposed to end at 5pm, staying an extra couple hours and taking that meeting will lead to more revenue.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
In this article for First Round Capital, Peter Kazanjy writes,
“Focusing on quantity might seem inversely correlated to quality of work. You want time to think deeply about a meeting, or to plan out a call, or to thoroughly read every nuance of an email. You want to perfect every detail of your pitch. I get it. But stop doing it … the reality is that maximizing activity is the best way to close deals. Jump first and prepare mid-air.”
Especially if you’re feeling like you can’t work any harder, or there’s just not enough time in the day to increase you activity metrics, try out these practical pieces of advice from Kazanjy:
- Don’t read your email communication history with a prospect before calling them. Just call.
- One proofread is all that email needs. Send it and move on.
- Learn what succeeds in your demos and bake it in on the fly during your next one.
- Automate and templatize anything you find yourself doing more than twice.
- Don’t overthink. Just act.
Jump first and prepare mid-air. Then keep jumping.
Introduction to the sales funnel.
But sales isn’t just about blind ambition and brute force. There is skill and finesse involved in getting prospects to stay on the phone, schedule a meeting, sit through a demo, etc.
Think of the job of a salesperson like a funnel.
The funnel is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. Moving closer to the bottom of the funnel means moving closer to the sale.
At the top are cold calls and inbound leads (prospects may be unaware of your company and your product). At the bottom are pitches and closes (prospects have demonstrated some level of intent to make a purchase).
It looks something like this:
At every stage, prospects (i.e., potential customers) will drop out of the funnel for various reasons:
- You cannot get a hold of them in the first place.
- You discover during qualifying that they’re not a fit.
- They stop responding.
- They give you an objection and decide not to buy.
As a result, there is a “conversion rate” between each successive stage of the funnel. Not every prospect makes it to the next stage. This creates the “funnel” shape.
The most successful salespeople will make their funnels as wide as possible at every stage of the sales process, so more prospects make it to the closing stage at the bottom of the funnel.
Now, this is where the hard-working, but unskilled, salesperson will start to have trouble …
The tale of two salespeople.
If you take two salespeople, both with an equal level of skill, and they both make the same number of phone calls, then we would expect their performance to be roughly the same.
Now, if one makes more calls than the other, then we would expect the high-dialer to outperform the low-dialer.
But what if we start to vary their skill levels? Using our funnel from before, let’s say that one salesperson has a 2x better conversion rate from pitching to closing.
Well, then that salesperson with double the skill can work half as hard (making half the dials) and still close an equal number of deals.
Or, they can work equally as hard as before and make twice as many sales, compared to the other salesperson with half as much skill.
This is where the hard-working, but unskilled, salesperson is at a bit of a disadvantage.
Because almost anybody can work hard in sales. Anybody can make phone calls and send emails. In the context of our sales funnel above, anybody can widen the first stage by making 100+ cold calls per day and sending out mass email campaigns. This is why SDR is an entry-level position.
But widening the lower stages of the sales funnel, increasing conversion rates from cold call to meeting, meeting to demo, and demo to close—this takes skill.
The type of skill that earns big commission checks for the salespeople who have it.
The type of skill that takes more than just hard work to develop.
Working smarter.
One of my sales managers early in my career used to tell me,
“You keep pouring gas into the tank, and I’ll help you build the car.”
It doesn’t matter how hard you work (i.e., how much gas you pour into the tank), if your sales process is inefficient (i.e., your car is a broken-down old junker).
So, you know you need to have an efficient sales process. You know you need to have a wide sales funnel with high conversion rates between stages. But where do you start?
To get better at sales, there is no better way than receiving and implementing feedback.
Here are the best sources of feedback, in order:
- Prospects
- Managers and mentors
- Yourself
- Books and videos
Click here to read more from BITS about feedback implementation.
Working smarter is really just hard work in disguise.
In fact, working smart is often even harder than just working hard.
It’s easy to pick up the phone and make one more dial.
It’s easy to repeat the same process over and over again, expecting different results.
It’s hard to seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes.
It’s hard to document your system and make marginal improvements every day.
Hard work is the bare minimum requirement to even get started in sales.
Smart work, i.e., working even harder, is what separates top-performing sales professionals from sales amateurs that bounce between jobs without much improvement.
Do both.
You don’t have to choose between working hard and working smart. Do both!
Work hard.
In the beginning, you have to put in the work. There’s no way around it.
Widen your sales funnel at the top by making more cold calls, sending more emails, etc.
Work smart.
Constantly seek feedback and develop a system for implementing it.
Widen your sales funnel towards the bottom by increasing conversion between stages with better call language, advanced objection handling, etc.
Possible career outcomes.
Based on these two variables—working hard and working smart—here’s where different salespeople are likely to end up:
- Unwilling to work hard — won’t even get a job in sales.
- Working hard, but not smart — stuck in an entry-level position, like SDR.
- Working hard AND smart — successful salesperson.
Be the successful salesperson!