Is There A Hidden Path To More Sales? And ... How Do I Find It?

The flow of business for most owners is communicated by their P&L: how much revenue has been realized in what timeframe. In the best-run companies, this equates to the value of actual production over that timeframe, ie, the value of goods delivered and services provided.

But there is additional insight to be gained by charting the “sales written” features of past contracts.

Companies following our Quick Books process can easily run a report that shows how many new JOB contracts were generated each month of the past 24. This information alone reveals the relationships between when jobs are contracted, vs when production happens – a booking curve vs a billing curve, as it were.

Now, connect each new job with the salesperson responsible, and the source of the lead (eg, client referral, design/builder relationship or net new client). Going further, if you have a date of the final invoice on these contracts, you now have a really valuable data set. Here are a few of the metrics you can calculate…

• Average contract size by month
• Average contract size by salesperson
• Average contract size by referral source
• Average length of project vs contract size

This simple exercise will reveal the footprint of your sales model, and help you determine a viable path to more sales. Especially productive (or non-productive) salespeople could be clearly identified – not just how much they write, but also what kind of jobs they write.

You might find trends, transactions, or referral sources that influence your activities going forward. You might find dependencies that require action sooner (e.g. too much reliance on one builder or one source of business). Your ability to increase future sales levels is often hidden in the look backwards.

Knowing more about the sales flow into your business can’t hurt and just might help you manage up to that next level.

If you’d like to know how to get the simple monthly “sales written” report out of Quickbooks, e-mail your request to [email protected]

And please share your findings with us. We are happy to help you think about what it means.