Adam Sand (speaker) critiques how outside sales reps spend considerable time on non-selling tasks (managing jobs, estimating, driving) and argues that the industry accepts unusually high failure rates. He uses anecdotal ratios (one-in-three, one-in-four, 50%) and comparisons to accountants and doctors to illustrate how a sales close rate that would be unacceptable in other professions is normalized and even praised in sales.
One big problem that we saw in the industry was the salespeople were not spending all their time actually selling. There's a lot of other stuff that they were doing, like managing jobs, commercial estimating they would spend time and driving. And I thought, well, what makes a great outside sales rep? Like, what makes them great at their job? If you're doing a great job at sales, it means you're winning about one in three. So if you go out to three houses and do three pitches in front of three homeowners and you get one sale, you're doing pretty good. If it's one in four, you're average. But there's no such thing as 100% close rate failing more often than you're succeeding. Let's turn that around a bit. What if the accountant got one out of three of the paychecks right? Every pay period, they'd be fired. What if a doctor was only able to help one of three clients or one of three patients? They would cry themselves to sleep at night with guilt. Yet as salespeople, we're like, that's good. I fail two for every time I succeed, and that's good. If you were 50%, you wouldn't barely get through high school, but you'd be one of the greatest roof salespeople ever. If you had a 50% close rate for an extended period of time.
