Adventures in the New Art of Sales and Sales Management

The short answer: Yes, your metrics lie.

Metrics are numbers; they are quantitative. They can tell you much. And they can you tell you little. What they lack is a qualitative context.

Example 1: Activity Metrics

Let’s take two salespeople and their individual numbers. Salesperson 1 makes ten face-to-face sales calls in a week. Salesperson 2 makes only five sales calls per week. Looking at the metrics, Salesperson 1 has twice the activity. Double the activity has to be better, right? The answer is no, it means nothing without the quantitative context.

Were the fifteen prospects that were called on all equal? Did Salesperson 1 only make twice the calls because they he called on unqualified prospects while Salesperson 2 called on qualified dream clients? The qualitative value makes all of the difference in the world, doesn’t it?

Simple, isn’t it? Then why it so infrequent that the qualitative value is added?

Example 2: Time to Close Deals (Cycle Time)

How about more complex metric? Let’s look at the time it takes to close a deal. Maybe Salesperson 1 closes deals in just under ninety days. It takes Salesperson 2 just over two hundred and seventy days to close a deal. Salesperson 1 closes deals in a third of the time; that has to be good, right?

Without knowing the deal size, the lifetime value of the deal, whether or not the deal is a good strategic fit, and some additional facts about each deal, this metric is meaningless. Maybe Salesperson 2 has the larger, more complex deals. Maybe their deals will produce far more value over time. Maybe Salesperson 2’s deals will allow them to create the kind of value that unlocks future deals and bridges the company into new strategic growth markets.

Not so simple to determine whether or not the cycle time should be shorter without the information, is it? Why then do we not work to discover it?

Example 3: A Look Into the Pipeline

If we peer into our fictional salespeople’s respective pipelines, we might find that Salesperson 1 has $1,000,000 in the final stage of the sales process. Salesperson 2 has only $600,000 in the final stage of their sales process. All things being equal, Salesperson 1 has a better opportunity to close more business, right? But all things aren’t equal.

Doing a simple opportunity review using the company’s sales process checklist, we might find that while Salesperson 1 has more deals in the final stage, that he also skipped over the important value-creating steps that might have given him a reasonable chance to win his deals. We might find that these deals aren’t really in the closing stage at all; in fact, they may not even be the kind of deals that his company wants.

Completing the same opportunity review with Salesperson 2 might show that the deals are rock solid, that the sales process has been followed, that the deal strategy provides a greater return on the dream client’s investment of time and money than they need to justify their purchase, and that she has verbal and written commitments that allow her deals to be forecast with great confidence.

Understanding these metrics is much more complicated that it appears on the surface. That is because numbers lie. More isn’t always better, and neither is less. They are meaningless unless and until they have the qualitative factors added in and they are properly interpreted.

Metrics Are Great Tools, If Used Correctly

I am not suggesting that metrics aren’t useful. Far from it! In fact, understanding your metrics is critical to your success.

But in order to make metrics valuable and meaningful, you have to look at them in the context of the qualitative factors. This isn’t easy.  Understanding the story that your metrics tell requires someone with the knowledge and experience to ask the questions that will provide the qualitative context that make them useful. In order to know what needs changed and what needs to be improved, you need to add these factors to your interpretation.

It’s often helpful to get a second, unbiased set of eyes on the metrics, someone who isn’t tied too closely to the outcomes. Someone with the knowledge and experience to help see through the numbers to the meaning that is hidden inside their relationship to the context.

Collect all of the metrics that are meaningful to you and to your sales results. Then add the qualitative factors that give them their context and their meaning. This will ensure that your metrics tell the truth.

Conclusion

Quantitative metrics are critical to your success and must be tracked. But they are meaningless without the qualitative factors that give them their context and their meaning.

Questions

1. What are the most important personal sales metrics that you track? Are they all quantitative?




2. What qualitative factors are missing from your sales metrics? What do you need to add to these metrics to make them meaningful and useful? What questions need to be asked in order to provide this context?




3. Who could you share your metrics with that has he knowledge, the experience and the background to ask the hard questions that will allow you to make judgments about your future behavior based on your metrics?

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

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You worked hard to create opportunities with your dream clients. Now that these opportunities are in your pipeline, your challenge is to keep them moving along from target to close, doing all that is expected of you and more.

One of the iron laws of sales is that the longer your deal sits between stages, the more likely you it is to stall (or to die altogether). Don’t believe me? Does your pipeline tell you something different?

Your deals have a shelf life. Once they reach that shelf life they die. You may not believe they are dead because the company is still in business. Heck, they may even be having a banner year. But your opportunity has no pulse. It stopped breathing a long time ago, and that little metric in your sales force automation that tells you how long it’s been between stages is now in triple digits.

Most sales force pipeline reports are often little more than a graveyard of expired opportunities. But this doesn’t have to be true. There is another way. A better way requires that you observe the shelf life of an opportunity and you make sure it doesn’t die of old age or of neglect. Here are three big ideas to keep in mind.

Focus on Dissatisfaction and It’s Cost

The more dissatisfaction, the greater urgency there is to change. Your opportunities are created and driven by dissatisfaction. The more you can focus on the dissatisfaction, the easier it is to move the opportunity forward. But it isn’t the dissatisfaction alone that moves deals; it’s the cost of that dissatisfaction.

Dissatisfaction comes with a price. By focusing on that price, you help to create the urgency that compresses your sales cycle—by compressing your dream clients buying process. Dissatisfaction is what moves your dream client to action.

Now you have to obtain the commitments that move your deal forward.

Collect the Commitments to Act

Your dream client is motivated by their dissatisfaction and the high cost of the status quo. It is your job to do something with that motivation. You have to ask for and obtain the commitments that move your opportunity forward and that help you to help your dream clients.

You have to obtain the first commitment, often the hardest, to gain access to the decision-makers and decision-influencers to collect the information you need to build your solution. You have to collect these, moving from commitment to commitment, always advancing your deal—and moving your dream client to a better future.

Days, weeks, or even months with no activity, with no made and kept commitments, is a surefire way to allow your opportunities to die of neglect. You may want to believe that you are being professional and giving your dream client the space that they need to decide. In reality, you are almost certainly putting your opportunity at risk to a competitor—or the most ferocious of all competitors: no decision.

Each commitment you gain moves you closer and closer to a deal. Commitments are what keeps your deal alive and within the boundaries of it’s shelf life.

Focus on a Better Future Result

It is surprising how much your dream client can put up with. They can learn to live with a shockingly high level of dissatisfaction at a staggeringly high cost. I have seen clients muddle through this way for years.

To observe the short shelf life of your opportunity, you must create an ever-present vision of a better future. You have to help them to envision the story of how they get from where they are to where they want to be, writing and selling that story together. Focusing on the future helps provide the motivation to change—especially when you can point to their return on their investment of time and energy. This helps to keep the motivation high if and when the dissatisfaction wanes.

Leverage dissatisfaction and its cost, collect the commitments, and drive your opportunity and your dream client towards a better future result. Measure the days between activities and commitments, and know that the longer the space between, the more likely your opportunity is to expire.

Conclusion

Your opportunities have a relatively short shelf life. You have to focus your efforts on moving your deal from target to close before that shelf life expires. Pay attention to these three big ideas to keep on track.

Questions

1. How many opportunities in your pipeline have expired? Is your pipeline really a memorial to opportunities that either died of old age or neglect?




2. What factors do you leverage to create both the rationale and the urgency to keep your opportunity progressing and on course? What causes these motivations to fizzle out over time? How can you prevent that from happening?




3. Make a list of the commitments that you have to obtain in order to move from one stage of your sales cycle to the next. How can you ensure that you collect these commitments and keep your deal advancing?




4. What factors can you leverage that motivate your dream client towards a better future result? How can you encourage their engagement in the process of helping you to write the story of that future and featuring you in the co-starring role?




5. Clean up your pipeline. If you want to create little grave markers to recall the opportunities past, go ahead. Use them to remind you of the opportunities you lost that you might have won. Then take action to ensure you limit these losses in the future.

For more on increasing your sales effectiveness, subscribe to the RSS Feed for The Sales Blog and my Email Newsletter. Follow me on Twitter, connect to me on LinkedIn, or friend me on Facebook. If I can help you or your sales organization, check out my coaching and consulting firm, B2B Sales Coach & Consultancy, email me, or call me at (614) 212-4279.

Read my interview with Tom Peters (Part One and Part Two).

Read my Blogs.com featured guest post on the Top Ten Sales blogs.

Read my monthly post on Sales Bloggers Union.

Get The Sales Blog iPhone App to read The Sales Blog and Twitter Feed on your iPhone.

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