If your salespeople don’t know exactly how many calls it takes to close a sale, and what the objective of each of those calls was, they’re just fumbling their way through the sale.

A critical understanding that underlies all your selling efforts is that selling is not hanging around being nice to people in some random fashion. If you don’t establish a sales strategy and customer-focused action objective for each of your sales calls, you will be wasting your time.

The key to sales success is to have specific, measurable customer action objectives for every sales call. For example, your sales plan may dictate that on the first call you learn about the customer, decision-making process and whether there is a need for your products / services. Your second call may be about learning if there is a budget for the item and what the selection criteria are for a preferred solution or supplier. The next call could be a presentation, proposal or demonstration and the final call could be to get a final commitment from key decision-makers.

It is irrelevant whether your sales process has 1, 2 or 10 calls. In each there must be clearly defined customer-oriented objectives.

When most salespeople are asked about their objectives for their first call, the answers are usually vague, varied, and focused on what actions they (as salespeople) would take, such as “build relationships, show buyers the product, get a foot in the door etc. All of these are important, but they aren’t customer actions, they’re salesperson activities.

What to Do: To create a multiple-call sales strategy, work backward from the objective of your last call, asking yourself, “Why can’t I do that now?” You’ll find out specifically what actions the customer must take on each sales call to advance the sale. You should be able to determine the minimum number of sales calls you need to close the sale. Once you have done this exercise, set yourself a challenge to keep sales to under this number!