How to Track Your Way to Higher Profits

Lots of Nigerian business people and sales people don't track the activities that they do everyday. They don't just keep, they don't keep simple metrics about stuff that they do everyday. And the reason why lots of you don't do that is because you don't know the reason why this is important. Now, sales is a performance discipline. It is just like sports or it's just like music. So if there's certain kinds of reps, certain kinds of activities, certain kinds of things that you don't do every single day, you're not going to see the results at the back end.

So for those of you who are musicians, whether you're a hobbyist or you're a professional, you know that if you don't practice your skills every day, if you don't practice certain kinds of passages every day, let's say you play guitar or maybe you play piano. So you don't practice your skills, you don't practice your lines. At the end of the day, it's going to show your performance is not going to improve because you've not been doing the things that you need to do every single day to get the guaranteed output at the end, which is you're going to be a very beautiful and proficient performer.

So for those of you who have hobbies and music, you know that it's just something you have to do. So you wake up today and you practice your skills. Are you going to do a major scale, a minor scale, a pentatonic scale, a jazz scale, whatever. It's just part of the process. So it's the same thing when it comes to sales as well. Sales is a performance discipline. So there's certain kinds of things that we're supposed to do every day that will grow our business and we should be tracking that accordingly.

Now, the reason why I'm talking about this today is because I was having a conversation with a sales manager, one of my clients, and she didn't quite get that. Look, this is the reason why this is your responsibility and it's your job role. So you should be tracking that thing. You have sales people under you. How many call attempts did they make every day? You need to figure that out. How many actual phone conversations did they have from those calls?

Call attempts that they made? You need to figure that out. How many estimates did they issue every day? You need to figure that out. How many emails did they send? How many text messages did they send? Or how many meetings were booked? You need to figure that out. So even if you're not a sales manager, but you're self-employed and you're an entrepreneur, these are some of the activities that you need to be tracking. How many calls did I make yesterday?

How many actual phone conversations did I have? How many estimates did I send out? How many proposals did I send out? How many emails did I send? How many text messages did I send? How many meetings did I book? How many meetings did I go for? You need to be tracking all these things because sales is a performance discipline, just like music and just like sports. So with sports, if you're not doing the practice, you will not be good at the end of the day.

It's just that simple. So if you're a footballer, you wake up, you don't do the the fundamentals, you know, dribbling, conditioning, cardio, practicing shots, you know, all the basic fundamental things, you're going to be a crappy, you're going to be useless footballer. So whether football, baseball, basketball, racquetball, you know, it's all the same. That's some fundamentals. So for those of you who are sales managers, for those of you who are business owners, for those of you who are self-employed, we have to be tracking these things and we have to make sure that we're doing these things every single day.

Because honestly, if you're not making call attempts, you're not going to be speaking to people. Whether call attempts, as far as you try to buzz people on the phone or you try to go to people's office, you suppose they call on people. At least you go attempts. Whether you succeed or not is not beyond you. But shall you suppose attempt? So you should be tracking it. Last week how many attempts? Yesterday? How many attempts?

Then the actual conversations they had. OK, so yesterday I attempted to call 20 people. Ten of them didn't answer. So I only had 10 conversation bit be tracking those things of the people, the 10 people that I had conversations with, how many people did we start talking pricing? Did we issue estimates? Did we look our proposals track that one of the remaining 10 that I sent that I tried to reach out to those ones who didn't answer, OK, no problem.

How many emails did I send as follow up? How many text messages did I send as follow up? These are all the activities that when we track every single day of every single week, every single month, that profit will be guaranteed at the end. Some of you say like what's the point? The whole point is just to make sure that we're staying on our daily disciplines because the revenue is going to come at the end of the day. If you don't understand it, I'm saying let me just put it this way.

If you wake up every day, you stay inside your house under the cool AC and all you do is you watch Netflix, how will money come and find you? Money will not come and find you. In this case, there are certain things that you have to do, revenue generating activities that will bring in money at the end of the day. Now, nothing is guaranteed, but like Brian Tracy likes to say, it's all about the law of averages. We're trying to do things that will put the odds in our favor.

So if you're making certain call attempts every day, certain you have actual conversations every day, talk money every day, send emails every day, send text messages every day, try and book meetings every day, then you're putting the odds in your favor. That profit is going to come at the end of the day, so we should be tracking these things. Now, the sales manager that I was talking to, she said, and there's no need to track because we have a call tracker, we have ACRM.

So the sales people already put all the details in there. And yeah, you know, fine, all well and good. But The thing is, as a sales manager, we're supposed to be on top of people and help them to grow and develop themselves. If you're not looking at these things every single day, things will start to slip. And The thing is the CRM, that's the customer relationship management tool and the call tracker and things like that, It doesn't show you what.

It doesn't show you the full picture. It doesn't show you the full picture. Let me just put it that way. It only shows you how will I put it? It doesn't show you the full picture, so it's unfortunate, but you do have to track on this very modular kind of level. Now there are lots of fancy high tech ways of tracking these sorts of things, but they're very simple, old school, tried and tested ways that never fail. And I spoke to the sales manager and I said, look, these are some simple things you can do.

While I was in paid employment, one of the things that we used to do was that's in my own team because I was in the, I worked with the civil service, I was in the Department of Works and Pensions in Scotland and we were customer facing. So we had to talk to customers every single day because we had to process their benefits and payment claims. And one simple way that my team and I used to do it was we just had a tally sheet.

And on the tally sheet, you will just put it there, you know, cases, processed phone numbers, you know, things like that. And what's a simple tally system for those of us who went to school in, you know, Nigeria, Nigeria primary school, remember mathematics, how they taught us how to tally by using, what's it called, using ticks and then crossing them out. So you, you, you do your tallies in five. So you draw 4 lines, 1234 and then the fifth line goes across it sharp 5.

So that if you look at your tally sheet and you see four of those blocks, you know 1234, the line across it, you see four of them automatically just an OK, that is 20. So that is simple. It's low tech. It's very clear. You can see that, oh, these are the amount of cases that are processed at the end of the day. So yes, if you go through the computer system and look at the data log, you'll be able to find out, OK, this person did this,

this person did this. But if everybody just has a sheet of paper on their table, every single time you make a call, draw one line, another call, draw one line. By the time you make 4 calls, draw another line, your 5th call, draw one line across, that's your tally 5 and then you move on. At the end of the day, slow tech is very easy and you can manage based on that. And that was a simple way that my team and I, because I was, I

was an assistant line manager. Eventually I became a line manager for a bit, but then my OGA came back and then, you know, I went back to being an assistant line manager. But it was a simple way that we all stayed on course. We were supposed to process 40 claims every single day and it was very easy. You just hash out your tally sheet before you leave. You just go and you drop it on your manager's desk. Sometimes, you know, yes, I was assistant line manager.

Sometimes I was a line manager. So sometimes you drop it on my desk. I look at that and I can see that. OK, no problem. Coley has been consistently hitting 404040 every day. OK, Cammy sometimes does 45, sometimes she's doing 12, sometimes she's doing, you know. So as a manager, by looking at all these things, you start getting a sense of who is in trouble or where is the trouble going to come from because she can start seeing problems in performance every single day.

So it's the same thing with business. If you have this simple tally sheet thing and you're tracking your activities, you'll be able to tell when there's a problem. So if for your business, you think you're supposed to be having two meetings every single week with potential customers and you're using this tally sheet, by the time you start noticing that ah, come, I've only been having one one meeting or for the last two or three weeks I've had zero meeting.

You will now know that, OK, a problem is going to come later on in the future because I'm not doing the activities and the metrics today that will guarantee the profits for, you know, next month. So this part of business absolutely sucks. It really sucks. The self management part, it absolutely sucks. The people management part, it absolutely sucks, but or more, we can't run away from it. It is absolutely important. If you don't stay on your team and make sure that they're doing all the things they need to do,

excuse me, call attempts, phone conversations, estimates, proposals, money conversations, meetings, emails, SMS. There'll be a problem brewing in your business and you won't know now. You will know at the end of 1/4 that profits are down. So it sucks. However it is you want to do it. You need to find a way if you want to look for high tech solutions, you know, data loggers attached to computers and whatever you know, whatever you want to do, it's fine.

Just do something. If you're not tech savvy like me, this tally system is very, very simple. 12345 cross it out. 12345 cross it out. If at the end of the day, your plan is to be making 1010 calls every day, 1010 attempts, by the time it's 4:00, you look at your sheet and you will see the you ever see two batches of two batches of five tallies or you don't. By the time you look at the sheets for yesterday, the day before, yesterday, and the week before, you'll be able to see whether you are on an upward trajectory or on a downward trajectory.

Then you will now solve the problem and you can start making changes accordingly. But anyway, bottom line, what I'm trying to say today is the self management part, it sucks, it's drying, it's boring, can seem demoralizing. The people management part, it sucks, but we can't, we have to do it. So pick a system, high tech, low tech, something that works for you, but track it. How many call attempts did you make yesterday?

How many call attempts did you make last week? With the attempts that you made, how many actual phone conversations did you have? If you're someone who likes to go out and visit people, no problem. How many potential customers or how many past customers did you schedule to visit last week? Of the five that you scheduled the visit, how many people did you actually jam in the office or how many people did you actually jam in the house?

All the people that you jammed, how many money conversations did you have? How many proposal did you put down? How many estimates did you put on table? How many presentations did you make? How many proposals did you drop? For the people where you know jam, how many notes did you drop? How many emails did you send? How many follow up text messages did you send? It is from doing all these activities every day religiously or every single week religiously that money will come at the end.

So please always remember that sales is a performance thing, is a performance discipline. Sales is like music. Sales is like sports. If you have not been doing the fundamentals when it comes to sports, you've not been doing your dribbling, you've not been doing your tackling, you've not been doing your raising, you've not been doing your conditioning. You've not been following boys in the morning to be doing your warm up.

When the time for the match comes, you'll be useless and you won't score goals and the boys will want you off the team because you know they do the fundamentals, you know they follow them do the fundamentals. It's the same thing with music. You like guitar, you like the flute, you like the clarinet, you like the trombone, you like the piano, you like the harmonica. Whatever it is, you're not going to be able to perform convincingly on the stage,

either by yourself or with a team, unless you have been doing the fundamentals. So let's say harmonica. Now mouth organ. You wake up every day, you like the mouth organ, but you don't practice, you don't run your skills. When the time comes to perform on stage, how would you make mistake? Anyway, I think I've overstressed the point, so let me just leave it there. Apologies for the noise in the background making the stage recording on a Saturday morning.

All the kids at home, you know, neighborhood kids, you know, every, every. So that's where all the noise is coming from, just in case any noise has bled through the microphones. So if you've gotten value from what I've heard and you'd love to connect with me, you can call me, send me a text message or send me a WhatsApp message on 08064662140. If you'd like to discuss with me how these things can be applied in your business on your own personal circumstances, then get in touch with me.

You can call me, send me a text message on 08064662140. If you're shy and you still want to connect, just to say you still want to connect just so you can be on my WhatsApp channel, that's not a problem. Then send me a message on the same number and we'll hook you up. So thank you very much for your time and attention. I'll catch you some other episode.