Building Sales Skills with SINALOA: Safety In Numbers And Law Of Averages

Many years ago I was sitting in a big hall, with a lot of people, listening to a famous speaker, salesman, and marketer named Larry Thompson. He said that there is a little state in Mexico called Sinaloa and that before we left that room we would lock that into our brain and never forget it.

I thought, “Oh yeah, as if!!” but more than a decade later I still remember.

It represents one of the most basic lessons in sales that anyone who is going to sell anything, or who works with marketing, needs to know.

He said it is the name of a town but also an acronym, S.I.N.A.L.O.A, It stands for Safey In Numbers And Law Of Averages.

What does it mean? It means that you will never be secure in sales if you do not have numbers working for you rather than against you.

If you need to do 5 sales a week you have really good people to talk with then talking to 5 may give you the results you need but ….. if just 1 person does not go forward then you fall short of your goal.

If you expect everyone to buy from you but you still talk with 10 then you only need half to commit and you will achieve your numbers.

If you want to be successful you need to have lots of prospects, lots of people to talk to, lots of people thinking about what you are offering and a lot of people who are seriously considering taking what you offer.

It gets back to the old adage, “the harder you work the luckier you get.”

Jim Rohn, the motivational philosopher, says “If you’re the best salesman and you close 9 out of 10 people you talk with, and I’m new and I close 2 out of ten, then we can have a competition and over a month I’ll beat you. Why? Because I’ll talk to more people than you do. If you talk to 10, I’ll talk to 100, you’ll get your 9 and I’ll get my 20.”

This is what Safety In Numbers means.

The second half of the acronym is LOA – Law Of Averages.

It works like this; if you sell widgets and make $100 for very one you see then have a profit number to work with.

If you’re going door to door then, if you have a good product, a normal sort of outcome is that for every 10 doors you knock on 3 people are likely to agree to look at what you offer.
If you then present to those 3, and do it well, then you are likely to make 1 sale.

Now the question - If you make one sale that day then have you made $100 on the sale or have you made $10 from it?

It you need to knock on 10 doors to get enough prospects to be able to make 1 sale then knocking on 20 doors you are expecting to make 2 sales, $200. If you think about this and realize that final profit is directly related to the number of doors you knock on. You need to knock 10 doors to make $100 then you are actually getting $10 per door.

You knock the first door and they say “No, we already have one”.
You say “Thank you for the $10”.

You knock on the second door and they set up a time to look.
You say “Thank you for the $10”.

You knock the third door and they yell at you and call their dog to attack you.
As you run out the gate you say “Thank you for the $10”.

This is the Law Of Averages.

These two things are very basic and we are all familiar with the idea but we need to keep them close to our heart if we are going to be successful in the long term.

A little state of Mexico, SINALOA, that few of us will ever visit, is a guide to us in a career in sales and marketing. nn