In tough economic times, do you get lazy, or do you work on figuring out ways to beat the competition?

Now is the perfect time to improve your sales strategy.

You can do this by following two simple, yet extremely effective practices:

• set your goals
• focus on your numbers.

Set your Goals

If you are in sales, you may have a minimum quota to keep your job.  You should have other sales goals beyond just staying employed. Do you want to win an award, or be the best in your company?  Do you want to earn a specific amount of money?  How successful do you want to be?

Setting your goal is imperative.  If you don’t know what your sales goal is, then it’s pretty apparent why you’re not doing as well as you could be doing: you haven’t identified how well you could be doing!

No matter what your industry, the top salespeople in your field have identified their sales goals, and they have all written them down. That’s how they got to be the best.  This is a universal habit among top performers.  If you want to be a top performer, implement this habit right away.

How many sales do you want to make this week?  This month?  This year? Write it down, right now.  Write out your goal in big block letters and post it somewhere that you can see it all the time.

Now you have a number to aim for.  You know, every day, what you are trying to achieve.  But how do you get there?

Focus on your Numbers

How many phone calls does it take you to make a sale?  If you know that you have to pick up the phone, on average, 24.36 times to make one sale, then achieving your goal is a simple process of applying a formula.

There are two basic types of sales plans that you can start your day with.

‘I want three sales today, so I will make 75 calls,’ or,

‘I hope I can make some sales today.’

Which of these two strategies do you think would be more effective?

All sales comes from activity.  For you, it might be phone calls, or face-to-face appointments, or mailings, or a combination of these.  There are all sorts of activities you could be doing to prospect and follow up.  How do you know which activities will result in the most sales?

Track your activity

Have a sheet of paper on your desk all day.  Make tic marks to record how many times you pick up the phone, how many times you leave a message, have a conversation, set an appointment, and make a sale.  Any activity that results in a sale, track this data for three months, and collect it all in an Excel spreadsheet.

You (or your company) may have an easy way to track this data already.  For instance, if you use VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) for your phone calls, there is likely a spreadsheet already in existence that is tracking this data for you.

Many people find it easier to track their metrics by hand, because it gives you a tangible relationship to your activity.  When you are holding your records in your hand, it’s not as easy to hide from a lazy day.

Use your numbers

Once you have some data to work with, decide the variables you want to measure against your sales. How many appointments does it take to make a sale?  Is it more effective for you to measure appointments, or would it be better to divide the number of sales you made last week by the number of calls you made three weeks ago?

If you have a basic working knowledge of Excel, you can play around with your data to find some startling results. If you log your time, you can also capture this data and use it to great effect.

The best analyst of your activity is you.  As you begin to track your data regularly, you will begin to notice firsthand what is effective in turning activity into sales.  Your data will show you.  Divide your weekly sales by your weekly activities, and you will have a formula that shows exactly how your activity translates into sales.

Apply your formula

Go back to the sales goal you set.

What is the activity it will take to achieve your goal?  Based on your own past performance, you know exactly how to do it.  Apply your formula, make the required number of calls, and set the right number of appointments, and your sales will come easy.

If you start working smarter instead of harder, your numbers will change over time. If your industry goes into a slump, or encounters regulation or damage outside of your control, the numbers  used in the past may not be 100% accurate in the future.

But who do you think is going to be the more successful salesman?

The one applying a formula to achieve his goals, or the one who’s hoping that someone, someday, will eventually say, yes?

Which one are you?

I was working an event this weekend, the Organic Brew Fest, for my day job.  I decided to try and make a few bucks on the side.

My kids found this incredible tent at Ikea, it was ten bucks, and it’s shaped like an igloo.  It’s easy to set up and break down, they play in it like its a hamster wheel, and have been in love with the darn thing for three weeks straight.  SO I went back to Ikea and picked up 5 more, set one up next to my booth at the brewfets, and put a sign on it that said

“Nap Tent, Free to Try, $20 to Buy.”

For the first two days there were no bites.  People and kids tried it out plenty, sure, but my pitch was still in development.

It was when I started running out of cash that I started manifesting.

I had been sampling the organic beers all day, and when I ran out of money, I realized I had forgotten to save $20 for my entrance fee into a networking event on Tuesday, something that I really need to go to.  So, I envisioned myself paying the twenty bucks to get into this event, and an hour later, someone came to my booth out of the blue and said, “Is this where we buy the tents?” He shelled out a twenty, and I made a sale.

This was very instructive.  When there was only ninety minutes left of the festival, I decided to focus on what I would do with the reward, instead of vaguely wish I had more spending cash in my wallet.

The T-shirts were eighteen bucks.  Drink tokens were a dollar.  I only wanted another one or two samples, and I decided I wanted a T-shirt.  I visualized myself wearing the shirt proudly, knowing that because I was wearing it, I was a successful manifestor.

This emotion fueled the manifestation.  I went up to a guy with two kids who was looking at the tent, gave him a pitch, and he seemed kind of stupefied as he said, “You know…I will buy that!”

It’s like he had this little voice in his head urging him to do this–it was his instinct, and he chose to follow it.  We’ve all had that instinct before, to do something because its just a clear hunch.

I got to see the genesis of the hunch during this manifestation.  And I like my new t-shirt.

You can think that magic manifestation is complete hogwash, and yet, the Law of Attraction can still be used to help you manifest your goals. Here’s why:

External vs. Internal manifestation.

There is a process of retraining your brain to be on the lookout for circumstances that match your new paradigm, instead of your old one.  Instead of making this happen outside, you’re changing your perceptions inside.

It all has to do with the bouncer inside your head: RAS.

Your brain is capable of processing more than 400,000,000,000 bits of information per second.

Per second!

You have at your disposal one of the most powerful computational machines in existence.

Your conscious mind, however, is only capable of processing 2,000 bits of information per second.

Your conscious mind does not need to listen to your heartbeat every beat to make sure it’s still keeping time. Your conscious mind does not need to monitor your pancreatic hormone levels. That’s what the supercomputer of your unconscious mind is for. If your conscious mind were overtaken with all of the sounds which you are ignoring right now, the smells and tastes and sights that you are not actively focusing on, your would have no capacity for actively focusing on anything!

The reasons our brains can do this is because of the Reticular Activating System. The RAS is a network of nerves between your cerebellum, your spinal cord, and your brain stem that filters out what is necessary and uneccesary for the conscious mind to perceive.

Imagine a bouncer at a very exclusive party, with a huge crowd of people clamoring to get inside. RAS, your bouncer, is very loyal to you, and will not let the exclusive party get overrun by all this riffraff you don’t want to see.

Ninety-nine percent of your bodily functions don’t get into the party. They are too uncouth, or just plain boring. Can you imagine, your conscious mind is working on maintaining a conversation with a friend about the virtues of your favorite movie star, and someone busts into the conversation and says, “Your endocrine levels are just the same as they were six seconds ago!”

Not at your party!

RAS is watching out for you. And he follows your orders precisely. He monitors this vast sea of data–not only what your body is doing, but what you are hearing, and seeing, and perceiving.  If you tell him, “RAS, it is very hard for me to make money. I make thirty thousand dollars a year, and I have never made more than that. I have a job that I hate, and I can take a prospect all the way through the sales process, right up to the close, and they will turn around and go with someone else! That happens to me all the time.”

RAS will say, “Okay, boss, you got it.” And he will filter that vast sea of perceptions in order to snag those party guests that you want.

The good thing is, you can always change RAS’s orders. You can tell him, “RAS, I am a millionaire. Money comes to me easily and frequently, and people want to do business with me.”

What does RAS say? “Okay, boss, you got it.” He will use this extremely powerful supercomputer that is your unconscious mind to compare your current perceptions against your stored memories, and he will find interesting combinations in the white noise, and shove them into your party.

You ever have one of those out-of-the-blue ideas? That was RAS doing his job.

He is working with more data than you are even capable of understanding on a conscious level. Use him, it’s what he is there for! Point him in the direction that you want, and you will hear a snippet of conversation from across the room that ordinarily would have been buried in the white noise of everyday life. This is RAS saying, “Hey, you need to pay attention to this. You told me to be on the lookout for good people who will make you successful, right? Here’s one.”

Trust your mental bouncer to do his job. He is nearly mindless, for once he has his instructions, he just goes and carries them out. But he does his job incredibly well.

Train him right, and use him to manifest what you want.

Photo by Mrs Logic

Dreaming is not manifesting. Desiring something is not enough to bring it about. Why?

When you wish for something in the future your wish keeps it in the future–out of the NOW.

If you are going to manifest your dreams, and make them become reality, then you must BECOME your dreams. Now. Today. This moment. For eternity exists only within the present moment, and if you do not anchor your desires in eternity, in this present moment, then when will they ever come about?

“Someday” is often a codeword for “never.”

Oftentimes, by wanting something, we focus only on the absence of it. It is not enough to recognize a lack in yourself, and wish for it to be fulfilled. By the Law of Attraction, you will be manifesting more lack.

If you want to manifest your desire, you must do more than wish for it. You must BECOME it.

This is the difference between wishing and manifesting: BECOMING.

Let’s say you have a goal to find a new job. You have done all of the visualization; you imagine what your working environment is like, how your day goes, what you wear, how you feel, how you move throughout the day. This is all good. But if you are only experiencing this as happening in the future, then it will never happen now.

James F. Twyman lays it out in his wonderful book, The Moses Code. The Hebrew name for God, while untranslateable, can be roughly understood as “I AM THAT I AM.”

One of the excellent exercises that Twyman gives in his book is perfect for BECOMING your goal. While holding your goal in mind, close your eyes and breathe deeply and slowly. Focusing on your goal, as you breathe in, say, “I AM,” and as you breathe out, say, “THAT I AM.”

Manifest.

Experience your visualization with the quality of ownership, and it will manifest itself into being! For you are a creator too. As a co-creator in this universe, when you declare that this job is a job that you have NOW, then the universe agrees with you!

Ask yourself, this moment, about the manifestations you are working on that have not come to pass. Close your eyes and experience them as already happening.  NOW.

What ARE you?