How to measure success in sales? This is an interesting question that has been addressed to me previously. It is like the notion of, what does success look like for you? I often see people only measure one aspect of a salesperson and that is the revenue or numbers target they have.
And yes, you need to manage the results against the target, however I would suggest that there are some other measures that you could put in place. My watchword in all this is just to make sure you do not end up measuring too much in a way that it becomes too much to manage and you do not end up making any decisions.
My simple rule on this would be only measure what you can plan on and make the changes. This includes closely monitoring to see the effectiveness of the changes.
One of my favorites sets off measurements is this. For salespeople we look at the leading measures. So the example is that, if your sales team have a 33% success rate of converting orders from when the first meeting takes place and it is a typical 12 weeks sales cycle, I would then recommend you set the measures of how many qualified appointments are required at week one to get the sales results at week 12.
Ideally you would also want to be measuring other key elements of your sales process, such as, how many suspects you need to create those qualified meetings which then give you a couple of leading measures so that you can manage the potential of missing a target in this case – forecast for the future with more confidence.
Depending on how long the sales cycles is, I would typically be looking at these key figures with the individual sales people every week, if they are working hard you will see the numbers in each of the activities. If they are not what you expected, you can take action in a week, not a few months when it is possible all too late.
We will finish with another one of my little phrases that will hopefully help when looking at what to measure. What works for your business and its success?
Sales people typically do what you inspect, not what you expect.
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