Overview of Activity-Based Selling

Activity-Based Selling: what it is and what to do

You’ll have to believe me when I say that learning about Activity-Based Selling was one of those moments that had me rethinking my approach to sales and helped transform my business.

You see, for years I hated sales because it felt so reactionary. I was sitting there waiting for people to call. I felt like I had no control over the process.

Enter Activity-Based Selling. By focusing on the activities you have control over (i.e., messages sent, leads responded to, prospects identified, or proposals delivered), you’re able to take actions that positively impact your sales process.

With Activity-Based Selling, you’ll:

Get more done
Feel more in control of your sales
Be able to see the relationship between your activities and new sales opportunities

Enjoy this video on the topic, and read the full transcript below.

Transcript

This is an overview of Activity-Based Selling — a method you can use in your sales process to close more deals.

What is Activity-Based Selling? It’s based on focusing on actions, not results. You want to focus on the leading indicators — what you’re doing to close deals — rather than lagging indicators like the number of deals closed.

If you only focus on lagging indicators (revenue, deals closed), you don’t really have any indication of what you’re doing right now to help close future deals. You’re only able to look at past performance.

Instead, by focusing on leading indicators, you’re more easily able to see exactly what you’re working on. When you focus on leading indicators with Activity-Based Selling, you focus on what you do, not what happens.

Leading vs. lagging indicators

Leading indicators are things like calls, conversations with prospects, meetings scheduled, and proposals sent — things that you do that move deals forward.

Lagging indicators are deals won or revenue — things that indicate a deal has already happened.

By focusing on leading indicators and scheduling your activities with prospects around these indicators of future success, you’re able to more accurately estimate your sales process and understand specifically what to do to reach your revenue goals.

How Activity-Based Selling works

You calculate your activity matrix to figure out how many prospects you need to connect with each month to meet your goals.

Step 1: Set your revenue target. Let’s say our target is $100,000 in revenue.

Step 2: Calculate your average deal size. Looking at past performance, let’s say it’s $5,000.

Step 3: Work backwards.

Deals needed: $100,000 ÷ $5,000 = 20 deals/year
Proposals needed: At a 25% close rate, 20 ÷ 0.25 = 80 proposals/year
Meetings needed: At a 40% meeting-to-proposal rate, 80 ÷ 0.40 = 200 meetings/year
Prospects to contact: At a 20% prospect-to-meeting rate, 200 ÷ 0.20 = 1,000 prospects/year

Breaking it down monthly

The important thing is converting this into monthly and weekly goals:

~83 prospects to contact each month (~20/week)
~17 meetings each month
~7 proposals each month
~1.5 deals closed each month (~$7,500/month)

In this way, you can more easily see the specific actions you need to take each month to achieve your overall goal.

Backwards planning your sales process

This is backwards planning. You’re taking what you know about your business, your historic performance, and your goals, and using that to plan exactly what activities you need to do to reach your target.

Monitor and optimize

These numbers are based on assumptions — historic data and conversion rates. What’s important is starting with these base assumptions, then monitoring and optimizing over time.

Maybe you discover your meeting-to-proposal conversion rate is actually 60–70%. You can plug those new numbers in and adjust your expectations to build a more realistic model based on what actually happens in your business.

The key: continually monitor and optimize, so you understand what activities you really need to take to reach your revenue goals.