The first step is to identify your target customer and determine how many customers it will take to maintain your business. Here is what I mean, using examples from different industries.

Let's say you wanted to sell residential real estate for a living. You would need to stake out an area that has a minimum of 500 houses. If you began a systematic schedule of contacting these 500 homeowners on a monthly basis, some in person, some on the phone, some by mail, and asking for their business, there would be enough houses bought and sold each year to make a living.

Another good example is insurance. You would have to have a list of one thousand households and contact them on a regular basis. There would be enough insurance needs to earn a living.

Both examples depend, of course, on your ability to out sell the competition.

Even a nursing home with 100 beds has to have them filled with residents. If they have 10 empty beds for any length of time their expenses go up and their profits go down. A hospital is in a similar situation. The success of their "selling" is measured by their "occupancy rate." The next time you visit a hospital ask what their occupancy rate is and you will be surprised at how quickly they can give you the percentage. A manufacturer looking for national distribution needs 200 distributors selling their product line.

Looking at a restaurant's business from a mathematical selling perspective can also be measured with precision. A restaurant needing to sell 1,000 meals each week to take in enough money to pay all their expenses needs a customer base of 5,000. A "rule of thumb" for a restaurant is to take one week's business and multiply it times five. Restaurant customers normally rotate their eating out, so we would want to be sure that we had five thousand people "rotating" into our business at least once every five weeks.

Sales is like anything else, it’s a numbers game.  The more calls you make, the more appointments you get, the more presentations you give, the more sales you close.  I know a lot of GREAT salespeople, but I don’t know of any that have a 100% first approach closing ratio, so what this means for them all is increased front end numbers to support the back end numbers.
Scott Green

This is something that I have implemented recently. I used to put a lot of pressure on myself with each new potential client. Sometimes it might take 20 sales calls to 20 different prospects before I make a sale. It really depends on how much I am willing to sacrifice to make a sale. Do you go to one company, get rejected and go back to the office? I think you have to have that failure expectancy and have the ability to shrug it off and move on. I guess if a pond only had 1 fish in it, we would not fish there very often and would not catch that fish for quite some time, if ever.
Jeffrey Mole

I average anywhere from 25-40 in person sales visits a week.  Some are to current customers, some are to prospective customers, some are to anyone who will listen.  I usually get only ONE interested individual out of 20 in-person visits.  This one individual still has to be groomed and molded – meaning credit reference checks, contracts signed, price negotiation, worker’s comp computed, etc.  EVEN when I complete all these things – sometimes it does not work out. I just keep going, knowing that the next one might be the one who buys.
Angela Brewer