Every sales manager wishes that their sales reps were more productive.
A sales team that is highly engaged and collaborative, works within a well-defined sales process and receives regular sales coaching can be a well-oiled machine…if it also operates with a data-driven mindset and studies the right sales metrics. It’s this last aspect that many sales organizations unfortunately eschew.
How can you know your sales process is effective if you’re not measuring it? How can you determine where reps need additional coaching help without analyzing their performances? How can you run an efficient sales team unless you do it by the numbers?
Short answer: you can’t, at least not very well. The key to unlocking maximum productivity from your reps is to track and analyze the right sales metrics and implement those actionable insights into your plan. Get started with these 3 sales metrics today.
Activity Efficiency Ratios
Many managers measure activities by tracking the number of calls or emails that their reps make. The truth is that the raw number of calls alone is not a great indicator of productivity or effectiveness – a vast majority of these calls are unlikely to be productive connections. Instead, managers should be looking at activity ratios – the number of calls that lead to demos, trials and ultimately deals.
Daily activity goals such as a set number of calls to hit provides a solid input-based foundation for employee productivity – everyday, no matter what happens, they can make this many calls. However, where managers can really improve productivity and results with sales coaching is by tracking the conversion rates of all activities progressing through the sales funnel. If a rep has a poor ratio of demos to trials, for example, you can focus on shoring up and improving how the rep is running demos.
Current Pipeline Opportunities
Having too many opportunities to work on and close is a good problem to have. Unfortunately, having this ‘good problem’ doesn’t let the sales manager off the hook. In fact, it is incumbent upon sales managers to help their reps sort through their open opportunities and help them prioritize the right ones to work on. Studying the current opportunities with upcoming close dates in each rep’s individual sales pipeline is a good way to improve this prioritization.
Opportunities carry risk factors with them, such as having an above-average deal size or languishing in certain stages for too long. These risk factors, coupled with the momentum (effort expended on these opportunities in recent times) help establish the priority of which opportunities to work on. Spend time with your reps identifying high-priority opportunities while purging the sales pipeline of stale opportunities.
Sales Funnel Conversion Rates
Conversion rates between stages lets you know what percentage of opportunities your reps are progressing from one stage to the next, all the way down to the bottom of the sales funnel. This can be a critically helpful asset when used correctly in sales coaching.
Looking at the sales funnel report, sales managers can identify salient coaching points about a rep’s specific strengths and weaknesses at various part of the selling process. Now that these weaknesses in an individual rep’s selling process has been identified, they can implement a coaching program to shore up that area of weakness. Is this rep struggling to present effective demos? Are they not qualifying opportunities well enough in the first stage?
These are just 3 of the dozens of different sales metrics that sales managers can track and use to help improve the productivity of their sales reps. These three metrics provide a solid foundation for identifying problem areas, the right opportunities to prioritize on and other ways of putting in more productive efforts while at work.
