A crucial component of sales management is having the right metrics for monitoring your sales team.
The most basic metric of all is, of course, gross sales—the “numbers on the board.” Too many sales managers use only gross sales, adding them up as the sales period progresses. The problem with using gross sales as the only measure is that you’re missing out on why the salesperson isn’t selling more. Not having this information, all you can do is scream at the rep, “SELL MORE!” Unfortunately, that almost never works.
Sales Process
Every sales organization has a sales process—and if they don’t, they should. The sales process maps out the exact steps the salesperson needs to take for each sale, to ensure maximum success. A sales process is generally based on the successful steps the top sales reps have taken in successfully closing deals. Lack of an exact sales process means that deals are probably being lost through undone sales process steps, and nobody knows it.
At SELLability, we isolated the basic sales process for any company, through years of research:
- Prospecting
- Research
- Contact and Interview
- Qualifying
- Education
- Agreement
- Closing
A company will always have its own sales process, based on how they sell its product or service. It will be found, though, that these basic process steps always exist in some form within any sales process. If they don’t, you’re probably missing one or more vital stages in your sales process.
Correct Metrics
The key to being able to determine how each salesperson is doing throughout the sales period—and with sufficient time to do something about it—is to have a metric for each step of your sales process.
For example, if your “Contact and Interview” step is accomplished through meetings, you might want to have a metric for each salesperson called “# of Sales Meetings Set.” And “# of Sales Meetings Held” Or, if your business is all done over the phone, perhaps “# of contacts” would be better, where a contact is defined as a conversation resulting in moving the prospect closer to a sale or closer to the next step of the sales process.
You would then have a metric for each subsequent step of the sales process.
Honesty
The key to the effectiveness of these metrics is having them reported honestly. You’ll know rather rapidly when a rep isn’t being honest, though, because sales won’t be ending up as closes. Being forthright with your sales reps about your intolerance of dishonesty in reporting and the value to them in terms of hands-on help in getting their deals closed through accurate reporting cannot be underestimated.
You can also point out that it’s totally in the best interest of the salesperson to be honest so that you as the sales manager can provide real help when it’s required.
Using the Metrics
As the sales period progresses, you as the sales manager can then accurately monitor each rep, and how they’re progressing. When you first begin using these metrics, you’ll most likely discover that some reps get hung up at particular sales process steps. That’s a great discovery, for you can then assist the rep in dealing with the sales process steps in which they’re weak. In such a way you’ll make the team much stronger.
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