Authentic Persuasion Show

[E95] Sales Tech Week: Reporting and KPIs

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If it isn’t measured, it isn’t managed.

So measure it, report on it, watch it,

then make decisions.

It is always surprising the sales teams

I see that have no reporting/transparency for the upper levels within the
organization.

In this episode I cover why this is

important and how best to set up your reporting process.

Episode 95 – Transcript

What’s going on. Welcome to

episode 95 of the sales experience podcast.

This is finishing week 19 on

the show, so glad that you’re here. If you haven’t already done it, please
subscribe iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. You can also find it on Sound cloud, Google
play. You can find on the cutter consulting group.com website with transcripts.

If you’re on iTunes, please

make sure to rate the show, lever view. All of that helps people out there when
they come across a show out of the 700,000 podcasts that are currently
available, they see if this show would help them and their sales pig and
hopefully hear from somebody else if this show is going to help them with their
sales professional career.

Now this week, if you’ve been

listening to it, I have been covering sales technology, so what’s in your sales
tech stack and a lot of times, yes, when I bring up the subject with companies,
with managers, with owners, it gets overwhelming.

There’s concern that more

technology is just going to cloud the process and the system. It’s going to
confuse the wraps. There’s going to be more things that they’re not going to
want to use. It’s just going to make sales worse and it’s going to make
everything harder when the sales stack is done right.

When sales technology is rolled

out correctly, it should be nothing more than a tool that helps the sales reps
do more, or the managers do more, or the company have more visibility over
what’s going on with the health of the organization.

Technology as a whole should

not get in the way or make things worse for a sales person. Now, there may be
things that you have them do, a new process, a new technology they have to
interact with, which they’re going to resist.

They’re going to fight,

they’re not going to like, and they’re gonna think it’s difficult or
detrimental for their whole sales process, but fundamentally, from a business
standpoint, it’s only there to help them and make their life easier and help
them close more deals, Andy, or help your managers manage them towards closing
more deals.

One of the hardest parts of

being a sales manager based on my experience and others that I’ve seen is when
you’re managing a team and there’s so many things going on, there’s proactive
goal setting, looking at the numbers, listening to recordings, and there’s
reactive on the floor, helping them close deals, overcome objections, you know,
handling issues, personal issues, whatever that might be within the sales team
and a sales manager job is very difficult.

In today’s episode, what I

want to talk about is that part of the tech stack [inaudible] doesn’t get
discussed very often. [Inaudible] isn’t very sexy and there’s no one size
solution for this.

However, it is important and

what that is reporting and data and metrics, all of that is so vital to the
health of the organization as they say. What isn’t measured isn’t managed, so
if you’re not measuring it, how can you manage to it?

No. If you’re a sales

organization, if you’re a leader or an owner, then you’re going to say, I have
reporting, I have the numbers, I have the metrics. But the key is do you, do
you actually have all of the numbers, the right numbers and at your fingertips?

I’m not talking about, hey,

next I could get a report from somebody that could tell me what’s going on. I
mean you could pull up a dashboard or a report in a few clicks to see the
health of your sales team and what’s going on and all of your key performance
indicators, all of your KPIs that you have outlined.

It would lead to a successful

and profitable sales team. Here’s the thing, right? A lot of times there’s so
many numbers available and if you’re not careful as an owner or even as a sales
manager, if you’re not careful, the numbers can be reported that make things
look like they’re doing well, but in fact they’re not.

I know a lot of sales

managers who will like to promote or push up the chain, various numbers like
closing percentage or the actual number of units sold or new clients like that.
Bottom line number, maybe the revenue, but the key is which of those numbers
actually give the health of the organization.

Because saying you have a

good closing percentage might not mean anything if the revenue per sale is
really low. So yes, you’re closing more sales, but if the revenue is low, it
might not outpace the cost per acquisition.

If your closing percentage is

low, may be a lot of times sales managers might promote the number of sales
that are being done, but that’s outside the number of leads that are being
taken in, which means your cost per acquisition could be unnecessarily high and
you may not even be aware of it.

Also, there may be times when

a sales manager might promote the closing percentage or the sales being done as
some top line figures. Well, without looking at the revenue of what’s being
done. And so there’s a lot of sales where basically the store is being given
away for the sake of closing percentage or the sake of closing numbers and
deals being done.

But what is the company

getting at the end of the day? And so you want to make sure that you have a
handle and a report right on all of the metrics that lead to a profitable sales
team and whatever that looks like. Now, what you want for your organization
that’s going to be customized.

Obviously I could tell you

all kinds of categories that matter, but really it’s the combination of those
metrics of those KPIs for your team, and everyone’s going to be different, but
there’s some combination of all of those where you’re going to look at it
because no single number will ever tell you how well your sales team is doing.

A lot of times owners may get a report from a sales manager of one of those metrics, like I covered [inaudible] try to make a decision, but it takes a combination of all of those data points and the intersection. So the closing percentage, the number of sales, the revenue, the cost per lead, cost per acquisition.

Also you want to look at the

cancels because it’s one thing to close a lot of deals, but if you’re not
watching the cancels out the back end, then it doesn’t matter because you’re
losing as many deals or you’re losing a percentage of the deals, which is then
driving up your costs and lowering your profits, so whatever you have in place,
whatever system you’re using, make sure that you have some kind of reporting
going on that gives you all of that as a snapshot and again, like I mentioned
episode, if you caught it, there’s many times in a sales organization you’re
starting out with spreadsheets.

There’s nothing wrong with

spreadsheets. When you’re starting out, you’re building your systems, you’re
building your process. If you have something that’s really good that solves
some problems that you’re selling, you know your product or service and you
have a solid sales structure, sales team in a sales system that they’re using,
then start with spreadsheets. We’ve all been there, we’ve all started teams and
companies on spreadsheets.

It’s nothing wrong with that

and you want to move your way up. Obviously you want to have things that are
more complex for your CRM, for your data points, but I’ll tell you based on my
experience, there’s always going to be some level of having to do some
reporting within the system or maybe externally because let’s say you have
salesforce, let’s say you have RingCentral.

Sometimes they communicate,

sometimes they don’t, and then you’re going to have to look at the health of
those numbers on maybe a spreadsheet where you compile it together.

If you’re using our CRM, make

sure that you have reporting on all of it. If you’re an owner of a company,
make sure you know what’s important and what the intersection of those sales
data, what that sales metrics look like that give the health of your
organization.

I can’t stress that enough.

I’ve seen so many owners being sold by their sales manager on what’s important and
what’s not important or what to look at and go look over here because the sales
manager knows they want in one category, but they’re not winning in another and
they don’t want to be held accountable or they don’t want to get in trouble.

So make sure you’re looking

at that and if you’re not sure what you should be looking at, please reach out
to me [email protected] or you can find me on LinkedIn. Just
search Jason Cutter and we can chat, set up a time to talk and I can at least
point you in the right direction and give you some advice on the metrics that
makes sense for your organization because there’s some that are key, right?

Like closing percentage

number of leads that are being taken, the cost per leads, cost per acquisition,
the number of sales, the revenue that cancels, but there’s going to be a
specific formula for your organization. I hope that helps. Thank you again for
listening.

I appreciate the fact that if

you downloaded this, you’re listening to this episode, you care about your
sales organization, the sales experience that your reps are giving, and what
you’re providing for them, as well as the sales experience that your customers
are having and how they’re being converted from prospects to customers, to
raving fans based on the sales experience you’ve built and the type of culture
you have in your place.

That’s it for this episode.

That concludes sales tech week, and as

Always, remember that

everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.

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Authentic Persuasion ShowBy Jason Cutter
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