So how many days do your sales reps really have to sell this year? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And the reality for most sales reps is, I don't think that they are able to see or comprehend the full year of selling opportunity at the beginning of the year. So we assign them a quota and they say, "Hey, I got a whole year to do it." And a lot of them don't put the pressure and the emphasis, especially in the first quarter, that they need to do if they want to be successful for the year. How many days do your people actually have to sell? Well, an interesting exercise for you as a manager is to take your people through this math, including the numbers, to show them how we need to get to work as soon as possible, because we don't have much time. See the reality of the process is, if we take a look, we have 52 weeks in a year and there's five business days per week. That means there's 260 week days that we have to sell.
Except we have a problem. There's a lot of those days that we're not available to be out in the territory with our customers. We have to deduct about almost two weeks of holidays. Between federal holidays, public holidays, might be as anywhere from 6-10 days that your people are taking off for the holidays. We have vacation days for these individuals, that sometime during the year, they're likely to take. We have the sick or well days that they're going to take. Let's assume that that's another week. And then you have all the meetings and training time that you need them in the office to go through and be talking about what's happening, doing training, and making sure they're aware of what's happening. So the reality for most companies is we don't have 260 days to sell. When I do this math with my customer, usually we come up with somewhere in the range of 200-220 days are all you have available to sell.
Now, so what's that mean? Well, what it means is if we now apply it and look at the quota of that person, let's assume that we only have a million dollar quota, we expect them to sell a million dollars in products this year. Well, we only have 220 days that they can actually be in their territory selling when we take away all of the other downtime days that are as part of their business. And so what that means is for that salesperson with only a million dollar quota, is they have to sell $4,500 worth of material every single day, on average, or else they can't make their numbers for the year. I find this is a tremendous exercise to take a sales team through, because most sales reps do not know what their daily number is they have to sell, or they take the number and divide it by 260 and it gives them a biased number. It's nowhere near the reality of what they have and the limited times they have to sell.
This is meant to help you put an emphasis on the salespeople to sell. What are you doing that's productive enough to generate $4,500 in sales, either today or long-term, out of this client because of the work you're putting into them? We've got to make sure the sales rep see just calling in their territory with, "Anything you need? Anything coming up? Anything I can help with? And how's the family?" And just this reactive showing up and selling them is just not effective. We've got to be more proactive because we have to generate $4,500 in sales a day if we want to make that quota that's been assigned to us of only a million dollars. Imagine what happens as we get to some of the real numbers, especially in equipment sales. And this number could be jumping as high as $10,000 a day.
So what are you doing as a coach and leader to make sure your salespeople are aware of this limited time we have in the year? A year to sell is just not that much anymore. Especially when we take away all the days that we can't get in front of our customers, and we apply the numbers that we have to sell. I would love to know the kind of numbers you came up with when you worked through your team, and the reaction they had to it. I would love to answer any of your questions. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage.