Archives for December 2019

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Everyone measures the bottom line. Sales managers typically know where they stand at all times relative to the sales goals that were set. However, that is not enough to get a true picture of the effectiveness of the sales team. Sales managers need to track activity at the top end of the funnel. How many attempts (dials or walk-ins) are the sales team members making and what percentage of them lead to a meaningful sales conversation? How many face-to-face or phone meetings are they having on a weekly basis? How many of them lead to a qualified prospect? Effective sales managers know exactly what activity is taking place at the top end of the funnel. And, they know the conversion ratios. Any change in the level of activity or conversion ratios at the top end of the funnel is cause for further investigation and possible intervention by the sales manager. Activity at the top end of the funnel can be an early warning to increased sales in the future or impending doom. Sales managers ignore this data at their own peril.

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Follow the link to schedule a call: https://www.advisorycloud.com/profile/Daniel-Caramanico

You must track pipeline movement to get a true picture of the effectiveness of your sales team. Most sales managers look at their pipeline regularly. However, what they usually look at is a snapshot of what the pipeline looks like at a given point in time. This is valuable information. But it is not enough. To get a true picture, you must track the movement of the pipeline. How do the deals move through the pipeline? How long does it take? Where are deals stalling. If you don’t track the movement through the pipeline you will run the risk of a false sense of security. Yes, you have a $50 million pipeline but how has the average sales cycle changed over the past month. What is the average sales cycle of the deals in the pipeline now projected to be? Answers to these questions are critical to understanding changes in the performance of the salespeople. If deals are slowing down, that foreshadows difficulty meeting numbers in future quarters and action can be taken to mitigate the problem, but only if you track movement in the pipeline.

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It is intuitively obvious that there is a difference between knowing what needs to be done or said and what a person can actually execute under the pressure of a sales call. Any sales manager has experienced the maddening effect of salespeople who “know better” continually fail at certain aspects of the sales process. The reason this occurs is that knowing what to say is an intellectual exercise, but execution involves emotions or what we call self-limiting beliefs. The easy example is discussing money. A salesperson may “know” that it is important to talk about the budget on a sales call and will do so flawlessly in a role-play situation. However, if he believes that it is impolite to talk about money and he further believes that the prospect won’t tell him what he wants to spend, then he will be ineffective in the field around the discovering budget. To be an effective sales manager you must know what self-limiting beliefs your salespeople possess.