Do your people know where they stand in comparison to the rest of the group? Do they always look busy, yet never seem to provide the results you're looking for? Can you easily predict future business, or are you just making assumptions based on last year’s numbers?
If you find your organization isn't taking advantage of the data that already exists, you will notice the following challenges:
- Reps are able to hide: It is often easy to get caught up with what appears to be sales activity from a rep. It may be activity, but is it proactive activity that continues to grow the book of business or is it just the comfortable behavior that retains clients and takes care of inbound leads?
- Competitive reps have no comparison: Competitive people like to know where they rank. Every company needs a “rabbit” for those competitive folks to chase. You will find an extra burst in activity from someone once they see what other people are doing.
- No social pressure: this is similar to #2. The great part about social pressure is that you let the tracking board or graph in your CRM do much of the motivating for you.
- Predicting future business becomes a dart throw or best guess scenario: Once you have a patterned idea of the amount of behavior, the number of opportunities in each stage of pipeline, and other critical KPIs, your business becomes more predictable.
Exposing sales metrics doesn’t have to be complicated. Remember the rule “low tech, high touch.” It should not entail complicated formulas or data your people don’t understand. Keep your team's pulse. Make the numbers visible and you'll notice that your climbers will climb higher and your campers will get left behind.
