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Are you a professional salesperson? How does one qualify as a professional salesperson? How can you prove someone is a professional salesperson? What observable qualities do professional salesperson posses? What does a professional salesperson know?

I had a discussion recently with a director of training for a national security alarm company. We were discussing statistics he should gather about sales performance in order to better help his company’s sales force. Directors of sales teams, sales managers, and team leaders regularly face the challenge of analyzing members of their sales team to determine training requirements, field support, or counseling, or to decide when it is time to cut losses and terminate a salesperson. I told him that from my experience the best approach was to start with the desired results and work backwards. I went on to explain what I meant.

I believe all professional salespeople should know to a decimal point what their performance statistics are, and therefore what they must do to achieve their desired income. Unfortunately, newer salespeople likely do not know their statistics, and thus need help and training to learn how to measure their own performance. As managers, I explained, we should know the statistics for each of our salespeople so we can help them become successful.

Compare sales with other professions and you will notice similarities. For example, baseball players know within a decimal point what their batting average is, and they track that average on a monthly basis. They know that their average most often dictates their earning ability. The higher the average the more they can negotiate for when it is time to renew their contract.

Basketball players, tennis pros, and volleyball players are acutely aware of how their statistics determine their incomes. Salespeople should also be acutely aware of the statistics that drive their success, and their managers must be aware too. When sales pros know the equivalent of their batting averages, they possess an important piece of their income forecast model. They know what they have to do to achieve their financial goals. Not knowing your closing ratio makes income forecasting near impossible.

Let’s say that a salesperson—we’ll call her Sarah—has joined my company. As her manager, shortly after hiring her, regardless of her level of experience, I will ask how much money she wanted to earn in total compensation that year. Will she know the answer to that question? We all have a desired income level, but often the less experienced sales people don’t sit down and say out loud to themselves, their spouses, their friends, or their relatives what that goal is. If they did, they might hold themselves responsible to hit that target.

So let’s say that Sarah tells me she wants to earn $90,000 over the next twelve months. If she were a professional salesperson who knew her statistics, she would be able to work backwards to determine the daily activity needed to achieve this objective. However, Sarah is new to sales, and nobody taught her how to forecast her financial year, so she doesn’t know how to plan her day-to-day activities. As the company sales manager or training manager, I should know what the overall performance averages in my company are, and by using that knowledge I should help Sarah plan her activities so she can achieve her goal. Over time I should be able to determine Sarah’s personal averages, and with that knowledge we’ll be able to fine-tune her financial planner.

Let’s say that at my company, people who sell the products and or services Sarah will be selling earn on average $400 per sale. My first step, then, is to divide the earning goal of $90,000 per year by our company average, $400 per sale, to determine how many average sales she needs to make by year end to achieve her financial goal. Next, I divide that goal by twelve months, and I spread out that goal in a ramp schedule with fewer sales expected in the first and second months and increasing in the months after that. The assumption is that if Sarah has just started, it will take time for her to build to what our average salesperson produces.

Now I have Sarah’s sales goal for the first month and every month this year. But I’m not finished yet. The next logical question is, what does Sarah have to do every day to insure she achieves the monthly, quarterly, annual goals we’ve planned for her? What daily activities must Sarah perform to hit her target?

Here is how the statistical averages come to play. Let’s suppose my people sell, on average, one out of every three presentations they make with a potential client. That means that in Sarah’s case, I should multiply the number of sales she has to make this month by three, giving me (and more importantly, her) the number of presentations she must make on a daily and weekly basis.

How does she ensure that she has the opportunity to make the number of presentations she needs to make? The answer is to keep working backwards and use the statistical averages for your company again.

Let’s suppose that your salespeople develop their own leads by cold-calling. How many doors must someone knock on before getting one person to listen? Do you know? Regardless of what you sell, if you dig deep enough, you will discover averages that you can use to help yourself or help your team determine what it takes to achieve desired results.

At a previous company we knew that, on average, our salespeople had to knock on twenty-five doors to make one presentation. So if a salesperson’s personal close ratio was one out of three presentations then, using statistics to forecast sales, he or she would have to knock on seventy-five doors to make three presentations resulting in one sale.

Getting back to Sarah and using the above statistics, we would develop the following action plan to help her achieve her personal income goals.

Annual goal	$90,000
Monthly	$7,500
First month	$4,800
Number of sales ($4,000/$195)	12
Number of days selling per month	20
Daily sales needed	.6
Closing ratio	33%
Presentations needed daily	2
Door knock ratio (historic)	25 to 1
Door knock goal (to make two presentations)	50

So in short, based on corporate averages, in order for Sarah to earn $90,000 per year, she needs to:

Knock on fifty doors per day (minimum)

Make two presentations per day

Make one sale for three presentations, paying an average of $195 each

Work twenty days per month

From this point on, Sarah is in control of her financial destiny. She can measure her performance against corporate averages. If she performs below average on any of the critical activities shown above, we’ll know where she needs help. If she is simply not making enough presentations, she will need to increase her output in this area. If she’s making the right number of presentations but not closing at the average rate, we have to work on her closing skills.

If she produces above average, great! She can change her results by improving any or all of the statistical averages. She is in control. She is on her way to being a professional salesperson.

Do you and all of your salespeople know their statistics? Are your salespeople in control of their financial destiny? Can you and your salespeople predict within a decimal point what their sales production will be this year and how much they will earn? If your answer is yes to all of the above, and your predicted sales volume meets the requirements of your company, you are truly an asset and you can safely call yourself a professional.