measuring-sales-performance

Sales Performance – what are we really measuring?

By / / Blog, Coaching, Performance Management, Sales Coaching, Sales Leadership, Sales Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales performance, Sales Results

The prevalent way of measuring sales performance is a combination of KPIs. These include the obvious sales results, and a few others, like number of calls and meetings, new opportunities, etc.

However, longer sales cycles and more complex ways of selling like Solution Selling and Value Based Selling, or segmentation approaches like Strategic / Key Account Management demand a more sophisticated approach to measuring effectiveness. The biggest challenge when measuring the performance of our sales teams is how to measure quality rather than just quantity of sales results.

Leaders need to move from a deficiency orientation …

Sales Performance – what are we really measuring? Read Post »

how-do-I-keep-the-cabin-safe-and-people-calm

How do I keep the cabin safe and people calm?

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Coaching, Communication, covid-19, Opportunity, Recruitment & Sales Recruitment, Sales Coaching, Sales Consulting, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Psychology, Sales Skills

In HR you support “pilots and crews” to help them run smooth operations. When a crisis like this one hits out of the blue, and sales and service operations are disrupted, if not brought to a complete halt, it is critical to help everyone get back on their feet again and find solid ground quickly and safely.

Whether your business has been affected by the COVID-19 crisis directly or through the ripple effect across the value chain from suppliers to the customer experience, your sales and service leaders and teams are probably concerned, both personally and from …

How do I keep the cabin safe and people calm? Read Post »

Forget NPS, it’s about NES (net easy score)

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Brand & Reputation, Customer Service, Sales Culture, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs

Making ‘my life’ easy in this complex world is customer experience gold.

However, everybody obsesses about their NPS – net promoter score.

If you haven’t heard about NPS before, it’s a metric for assessing customer loyalty for a company’s brand, products or services. Many companies use NPS as part of their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy because the metric is easy to calculate.

Getting promoted more often for the right reasons is only underpinned by how well we address our customers’ needs and priorities and how easy we make the experience for them.

Too many companies have not addressed the customer’s buying journey and …

Forget NPS, it’s about NES (net easy score) Read Post »

Metrics for Measuring Solution Selling

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Complex Selling & Transactional Selling, Performance Management, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Social Sales, Solution Selling

How do we measure sales performance now?

As many formally product-focused companies migrate to selling solutions, most overlook one critical component – the way they measure sales performance.

Sales people, using a solution-selling approach, generally nurture larger, more complex and lucrative deals; they are engaging in business-level discussions with key executives in prospect companies and invest heavily in building long-term, trust-based relationships with key decision makers. But in many instances, their success is still being measured using the old transaction-based sales metrics.

Working with many, many sales leaders and their sales teams since 1995, we understand that while making the …

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Sales Trend 9 – Marketing technology for better sales results

By / / Brand & Reputation, Collaboration, CRM, Marketing, Sales Forecasting, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Pipeline, Sales Results, Sales Trends

Guest co-author: David Hubbard CEO, Founder and Revenue Growth Expert for Marketing Outfield, New York, USA

Sales Trend 9 from our  12 Sales Trends Report for 2016 is about using Marketing technology for better sales results.

Sales and Marketing Technology – Which Trends Should You Pay Attention To?

No wonder we are confused. The number of vendors providing Advertising, Marketing OR Sales technology “solutions” has exploded in the last couple of years with it becoming a large multi-billion dollar industry with revenues growing at double digit percentages annually. There are now over 3000 vendors (and more in …

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What’s the right Sales Conversion Ratio for my sales team?

By / / Prospecting, Sales Forecasting, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Results, Sales Tips

At Barrett, we get asked a lot about what is the right sales conversion ratio for sales teams.

And our answer is to offer more questions such as:

  • Are the market(s) you are targeting in growth, mature, decline, or saturation mode?
  • What value propositions are you taking to market to your prospective clients in terms of commodity low cost options or value beyond product and price, and ROI?
  • How clear is your sales messaging to capture the share of mind of your target markets and enable your salespeople to be very clear and concise about the value they bring when prospecting and selling?
  • How effective …

What’s the right Sales Conversion Ratio for my sales team? Read Post »

Survival of the Adaptive P3: Use Effective Sales Metrics

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Performance Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Strategy

This series of ‘Survival of the Adaptive’ articles will look at the key things we need to do as sales teams to contend with the many changes afoot in our 21st century world and market place.

Part 3 is all about using effective metrics to track sales

In an ideal world, the financial returns and the ability of the sales force to generate business at respectable margins would be precisely calculated, and deciding the effectiveness of any sales strategy would be simple. In reality however, there are multiple, and usually imperfect ways to measure most …

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Sales Reporting – Why Bother?

By / / Sales Forecasting, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Results, Sales Skills, Sales Tips

Recently, I met a very impressive young Sales Manager. Let’s call him Sam. Sam knew his sales stuff. He knew what to look for when it came to accurate reporting of sales data. Nothing too complicated. He was conscious of focussing on the key measures and not overloading his sales team with too much reporting because he wanted his sales team out there selling instead of being glorified administrators.

Sam is my kind of sales manager. There for his people and his company making sure that his sales team knew exactly what was expected of them in terms …

Sales Reporting – Why Bother? Read Post »

Why managing sales inputs leads to sales disaster

By / / CRM, Education in Sales, Performance Management, Sales Forecasting, Sales Management, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Sales Motivation & Rewards, Sales Pipeline, Sales Results

‘Selling is a numbers game’ has been said more times than any of us care to remember.  And yes, numbers are critical to sales, however some organisations place far too much emphasis on the managing the numbers, especially their obsession with their salespeople’s input activities – i.e. number for prospecting (cold) calls, client meetings, numbers in the pipeline etc. This “management by numbers” approach is flawed and leads to confusion, distress and worst, poor sales results over both the short and longer term.  The approach fails to grasp that up to 80% of the activities of a sale are outside …

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Breaking the Chain of Ignorance – upping the pace of transformation

By / / Attitudes & Behaviours, Communication, Sales Driven Organisations, Sales Forecasting, Sales Measures - Inputs & Outputs, Success, Vision, Mission & Purpose

In December 2012, we published the 12 Sales Trends Report for 2013 and released a brief summary of each trend. This month we are focusing on the Sales Trend “Breaking the Chain of Ignorance – upping the pace of transformation”.

It is not enough to adapt to change, we need to keep ahead of the curve and continue to transform ourselves before the change arrives – opting to stay conservative will be a riskier strategy than taking risks to transform.  But the risks don’t need to come from the unknown.  The key to …

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