There’s no getting around it, sales is a numbers game.
The truth is, the more I talk to our clients, the more I will sell.
Every sales person knows this, and that’s why I sometimes find it odd that there still are sales people who are against tracking sales activities.
If you feel confident in your role as a sales person, tracking shouldn’t scare you, but rather give you security.
That being said, I do feel that tracking sales activities for the sake of monitoring every sales rep - every moment of the day - isn’t the point.
The point is to collect data so that you can use it to improve your sales processes, coach your sales reps and in the end - sell more.
Some people seem to think there is a contradiction between result-based management and sales activity tracking, but there really isn’t.
These two support each other.
You should use tracking to ensure everyone knows what is needed to reach your goals.
Another reason for tracking is that while you can only control the activities, you can’t control the outcome. If you try to do this, you are already late.
Sales activity tracking is not about tracking pickups, even though I think that is interesting as well. To make the most out of tracking, you need to start out with the outcome you want, and then count backwards - to understand what needs to happen in every step of the sales cycle.
Let’s say you want to close a million, that is your goal. You then use conversion ratio - or what I like to call hit rate - to determine how many opportunities you need to create, in order to reach that goal.
When you know how many opportunities you need, you can determine how many customer encounters you need to have.
By dividing the process into small steps, you will in the end, know how many prospects you need to have for each month, and how many numbers you need to dial.
If you don’t know you teams closing ratio - start out by calculating it. Count how many calls you need to book a meeting, how many meetings you need to have to create an opportunity, how many opportunities leads to a deal etc.
When you know the closing ratios for every step in your sales process, divide the goals into daily or weekly targets to make them reachable.
You might also want to have different goals for junior and senior sales people. Since the first ones might need to focus more on calls and amount of conversations, while for more senior people, it might make more sense to put more focus on the end of the sales funnel.
Tracking the most important activities will show your employees which activities are valued, important and needed to reach target. For this to work you need to track only the most important activities to make sure this is what the sales people are spending time on.
Activity tracking gives employees the ability to coach themselves and closely monitor that they are performing on the level needed to reach target. By tracking you will actually have to manage your salespeople less, as everyone knows what is expected. Salespeople can see that activity pays off and compare themselves to others.
You have accurate and non-negotiable data to use for coaching. You can do quick turnarounds if needed.
As a new person on a job, it is nice to know exactly what is expected. Your new recruits will know from the start what to focus on, what is needed to reach targets in the beginning. You can even show them how their close ratio will improve over time and the more effort they put in in the beginning, the quicker they will improve on all areas.
Salespeople want to work smarter, not harder and tracking will also lead to better close ratios in the end. Sales people will learn which activities are valuable and develop an understanding for what is needed to bring in a new deal.
Sales people will see what is needed in the different roles. Transparency is the key to success -it leads the way to learn and see how things are done and how to get better.
By tracking activities you will also get other interesting data points, such as lead-response time, general lead time, rate of follow-up contact etc.
Teamwork is the ability to work together towards a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.
In the end all of this will give you overall better sales results!
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These Stories on Sales Activity Management
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