subject: It's A Numbers Game - How To Track Your Cold Calls [print this page] Do you track your cold calls? In order to understand how well you are doing when you are prospecting by phone, you can track your calls.
Tracking your cold calls will also help you get an understanding on how many calls you need to make to talk to a prospect, book a meeting, close a sale. This in conjunction with your current accounts will help you understand and play how you can grow your sales and territory.
Track calls by calls made, connections (this is when you talk to the contact), meetings booked and finally sales made.
How to track your Cold Calls:
1. Use an Excel spreadsheet and make sure that you name it something that you will remember or something that has to do with the campaign you are doing.
2. Along the top row, use the following headers: Company, Contact, Title, Date Called, Call Made, Contact Made, Meeting Booked, Sales made.
3. Notes Column (Optional) - I usually put something in here if I talk to someone or have something that will prompt me to remember something later on when I go back to reference the spreadsheet.
4. Follow Up Column (Optional) - I usually put something in the spreadsheet if there is a follow up action, like call back or send information or whatever.
I use the number 1 in the columns where I am tracking so that I can tally the totals and build the statistics I need to determine different ratios such as calls to sales or meetings to sales and others. At the bottom of the spreadsheet, I total the columns.
If you track every step, such as calls made, contacts, meetings booked then you should be able to determine what an average sale is for you and from there, try to determine how many calls you will probably have to make to hit your sales numbers, such as your quota.
For example, let's say you have a $1M quote and that $600K comes from current clients. You know that you have to grow your business by $400K to hit plan (please note, try to exceed plan - being average is not cool). If your average sale is $10K, then you nee to make 40 new sales. Knowing that you average 1 sales per 5 calls, you will have to make 200 calls to grow your business by $400K.
One other thing you can determine from this is how many calls you will have to make a day to grow your business. Say you work 48 weeks a year. 2 weeks holidays and a couple of weeks of statutory holidays. These means you work 240 days a year. Since you have to make 200 calls to grow your business, you will need to make a call every 1.2 days. Basically, make a call a day and exceed your quota.
So what you can see here is that sales really is a numbers game. Track your results and plan your progress. You will be amazed at how quickly you will be able to predict and plan your business.
