To Shoot To Score: Greavsie's Selling By The <strike>Numbers</strike> Ratios
RIP Jimmy Greaves:
"What I had to do was get in the box 500 times a season. 100 times I'd connect. 50 times the goalkeeper would save it. Half of the rest would go in and 25 goals a season would do me – just by making sure I got in the box 500 times" (Great life lesson)— dave trott (@davetrott) September 19, 2021
The silky skills of Jimmy Greaves shone both on the pitch and later, on the tv pundit chair. Well ahead of his time, the future flowed from him. His goalscoring feats from the Sixties remained unmatched until the modern-day march of Ronaldo and Messi.
Whether this above quotation is true or not, it feels genuine.
Football by numbers.
Yes, you can score from outside the box.
But that wasn’t his forte.
You could loiter in playground goal-hanging fashion awaiting knock-downs or crosses.
But again, he was a specialist at creating his own chances running in on goal.
And you could play for a top of the table team of serial trophy winners creating chances on tap.
He didn’t quite make that bid, either.
In his own mind, he had a formula for success.
Break it down, take it in;
What I had to do was get in the box 500 times a season.
100 times I’d connect.
50 times the goalkeeper would save it.
Half of the rest would go in,
and 25 goals a season would do me – just by making sure I got in the box 500 times.
A process all of understandable, repeatable and sustainable.
I am on occasion baffled by the lack of equivalent start thinking in Sales pursuits.
What is your ‘penalty area’ (aka “the box”) where suspects are found and prospects uncovered?
How many times a “season” must you get into such a sales opportunity?
What proportion of these can you properly “connect” with?
Which of these get ‘kept out’?
And how many of the remainder would “go in”?
Then once you know these numbers, you must think in two key ways.
First, convert them to ratios. For sales is not the numbers game of the pop-culture lore. It is very much rather, a ratios game. In this case, five percent of pursuits become closed. And all stages in-between can be accurately modelled.
Then, second and just as crucial, you can set about improving on them.
When you start, you might be only ‘connecting’ with one in ten you ‘open’. With refinement at your core, you’ll get this down to solution selling best practice. Which is to be better than one in three coming through the ‘process’ and notched up as your “goal”.