Before you read on, take a moment to soak in all of the metrics that can be found in the infographic below. Those are sales metrics that basically mean you’re losing business and it’s all because no one is helping the sales team understand the numbers of sales.
For a sales professional their career is basically a never ending numbers game from targets, quotas to meetings per week. Their ultimate success and they reason they’ll be given a bonus is down to the number of sales they bring in which then brings me to the effectiveness of sales approach.
From a sales professionals point of view very few are going to spend the time inputting data and metrics that show how many times they called someone which also means they are incredibly unlikely to take the time to compile the data to analyse and determine the best course of action.
For a sales leaders point of view compiling data should really be your task to complete because you’ll also have the added benefit of not putting bias on data that is the strong point of a sales person rather you’ll be looking at the whole process from meeting to closing.
Once you understand the metrics and the data behind it you’ll soon begin to pick up on the sales people who are the all stars and laggards not by the number of deals they bring in but by they efficiency and effectiveness during the sales cycle.
This is key data that needs to then be shared with the team so that they can understand where they need to improve and where they are excelling because until then most sales people and leaders tend to rate success on the number of deals that are brought it.
However a fluid and efficient process not only limits the amount of missed opportunities, lack of follow ups and ultimately lost business it also helps to create a sales team that has a different attitude to the sales process.
