This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke. Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems. She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient. She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.
Metrics, metrics, metrics…don’t know about you, but our sales team hates the word! Some of them claim it’s the big brother feeling, some of them just hate having to keep track of one more thing, but for management, metrics are the lifeblood of our organization.
Here at ReachForce we have an inside sales model so we sell just about every deal over the phone. We used to be content just tracking meetings set, proposals sent out and deals closed. We felt like keeping up with these few metrics was enough. We were at ease knowing most of what was going on, but when our sales team struggled we had zero visibility into why.
As we have grown as an organization we have learned that we can’t be lax on metrics, regardless of what someone “typically delivers”. When we would notice a hiccup in our sales results, our initial knee-jerk reaction was to change how we approached things, re-visit our value proposition and the way we are communicating it to potential prospects, talk about what triggers, etc. All great things to discuss and reinforce but it didn’t lead to the big change we wanted to see. We went back to the drawing board. We started looking at things a little differently and we noticed some trends among the metric conversion rates and numbers for our top performers, trends we had no line of sight into before.
Here’s what we did:
Displayed activity and metrics for the entire company to see. It now was very obvious when someone is struggling. Everyone’s information is updated every day – metrics reporting is now mandatory. Does our sales team like this? Probably not but my thought is, if they are delivering then what does it really matter? And, let’s face it, like most start ups sales is the lifeline for our business.
Since instituting mandatory metrics tracking and “the board” we have seen some pretty great results. Having an instant, always available picture of sales activity makes tracking things through the funnel and forecasting much clearer for us. Just imagine, if you know how many connects a sales rep has to make to set a meeting and how many meetings it takes to get a proposal, partner that with your proposal to close rate and bingo, you’ve got a good idea of how much activity will be needed to drive a close. The cool thing about this is that for us, the reverse engineering of activity translates pretty well into results.
On the other side of the house, instituting mandatory metrics has made sales more transparent to marketing. Our marketing team now has a much better idea of what our sales team needs to hit our company goals. Additionally, our marketing team uses the same numbers to gauge:
- what marketing messages are the most effective
- what messages aren’t driving hand raisers
- what kinds of programs are needed to drive the leads sales needs
- how many or how big programs need to be so our sales team can spend time talking to warm prospects, not cold leads
Simply put, metrics may be a hassle for some but they are a necessity for both Marketing and Sales to keep a pulse on their ultimate challenge – driving more business faster and more efficiently.
What key metrics are you tracking? Are they giving you the information you need to make the right decisions for your business?
I’d also love to know if anyone else is tracking daily or weekly metrics in a public place. It seems to be working here. In fact, it has really upped the competition among our sales team.
