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Measuring and tracking activity in business can help you make informed decisions to take you to the next level in sales, marketing and all aspects of your business.
As a business owner or manager, the relationship between your customers and the sales team is important because that is the foundation of your business. Hence, it’s vital to track the performance of the sales team and how they handle clients.
Measuring and tracking sales teams' efficiency helps the business achieve its goals since tracking and measuring performance pushes each sales team member to reach their goal, hence meeting the overall business goals, more profits, revenues, and hence more business growth.
Measuring and tracking teams’ performance is one of the most important indicators of whether a team has met its objectives. However, to measure the individuals or team’s performance and track efficiency requires you to use sales metrics.
To know who has kept a deaf ear off their goals and those who are losing a path of their goals, tracking is the way to go. Suppose you want to keep good performance on a straight line. In that case, you need to stand somewhere in the middle where you can keep an open eye on whatever is taking place and how it’s being executed, where you realize it’s not going right. You might need to use an iron hand to align the teams or set new goals and manage expectations.
So, what is sales efficiency?
Sales Efficiency refers to the speed of your sales operations and how fast sales-related activities can be completed.
Alternatively, sales efficiency is a metric that helps business people to know the revenue impact of each dollar spent on expenses or investments.
Sales efficiency is basically about how fast you can convert users into leads/sales. While still generating the highest return on your investment, it is the revenue generated by your sales team relative to the cost. Therefore, sales efficiency can actually have a significant impact on the success of your sales strategy. Efficiency involves doing things right with the inputs invested.
To improve your sales efficiency, focus on improving time efficiency.
To populate and calculate sales efficiency, divide the amount of revenue generated by the business in a certain period of time, then divide by costs incurred by marketing and sales teams within the same period of time.
It is valuable to track sales efficiency; this is why you should do so;
It shows transparency that exists between the sales team's performance and the revenue generated by the business.
Sales efficiency gives you insights into how good your business is doing
Enablement aids to move forward sales metrics
Captures all the new revenue generated by the business
To get your sales efficiency up to a standard, you need to put forward sales enablement, use efficient sales representatives, train your sales reps efficiently and conduct an audit.
Sales metrics are commonly used as means of measuring and tracking sales efficiency.
Sales metrics are data points used to represent an individual or team or company’s overall performance. Sales metrics are helpful in measuring steps forward towards achieving the intended business goals, making changes regarding sales returns, making strategic decisions for the business, giving incentives and commissions as well getting a foundation for the future of the sales of the business.
To accurately measure your sales team's success and sales efficiency, you need some vital metrics to help your business keep on track.
Here is a checklist of some of those important metrics that you might need to help while measuring performance;
Activity sales metrics
Sales productivity metrics
Pipeline sales metrics
Tool metrics
Channel sales metrics
Sales hiring metrics
Sales process metrics
Adoption metrics
Lead generation sales metrics
Sales key performance indicators
Outreach sales metrics
Primary conversion metrics
How to track the efficiency of your sales team
1. Clearly define goals to be met by each individual and team goals and evaluate them at the end of the agreed time period.
Setting goals for your team is a good kind of motivation towards great performance. Setting goals for your team as a leader is a credible job. However, engaging your team in setting the goals would be a good job done; team engagement in objective and goal setting makes them become part and feel attached to the activity which boosts their energy towards execution and timely delivery. Additionally, it helps teams and their members to discuss widely while tackling challenges alongside figuring out how best these challenges can be addressed; this will bring out the reality of set goals and objectives and teams will be encouraged to work towards achieving them.
2. Measure both long and short term goals
For your business to achieve the intended goals, you have to think of measuring goals. While measuring performance, your focus shouldn’t just be on short-term goals but long term too. This helps to achieve the exact results of your business performance and business goals. Most business people focus on measuring short term goals and quite often these tend to be met. It’s been found out that in most cases, people keep their eyes off the long term goals and forget to evaluate them, yet they are important in helping the business to realize its goals. However, one who focuses on measuring the two gets positive feedback vis-à-vis business performance. Therefore, it is recommended that achieving and evaluating daily goals and numbers is more effective than long-term numbers and goals so that you could consider that just for the goodness of your business.
3. Make use of the image dashboards to reflect in all pipeline stages.
Before you get to the stage of putting a seal to a deal, there are stages that you must go through while filling the sales pipeline. These are; tracking sales prospects and nurturing sales leads to qualify them. Visual data is beneficial for areas that need a retouch and making the sales process easy. Metrics help you know the flow of the pipeline and any arising problems; this will in the long run help you improve the rate at which your close deals hence improving performance and achieving target sales quotas.
4. Find user-friendly systems to help you work more smartly than working harder.
Quite often, sales team leaders put in place systems to help them track efficiency and performance of sales teams and individuals much as this is good and its very help to know how your business is doing though some people use systems that are a bit complicated which makes their work a little hectic and tiresome which might not be fair in terms of assessment. However, a lighter alternative can help reduce the workload by going more direct; Pipedrive’s customizable sales reporting features. These give you a chance to get a clear picture of the precise data you would like to have while evaluating and measuring the success of your sales team.
5. Do several follow-ups and meetings to catch up with teams
It is not an effective measure to trust the data you have not followed up. Accurate data comes along with several actions happening, like planning meetings. It is also important to give a chance to each one of the individuals to share their own experiences so that the team members can learn from each other. While in the discussion, try to compare what teams have achieved and what they were meant to achieve initially (initial set objectives), conduct a thorough check and find out if teams need any support and let them be specific on what they think needs to be improved or brought in place for better business performance and meeting goals.