Improving your sales results with just one measurement

Most of us have heard the old carpenter saying, “Measure Twice, Cut once”.  It’s a reminder to double-check our measuring and marks when doing a home repair project.  This is a great rule of thumb.  I know it saved me numerous times over the last 40 years of DIY home repairs.

When selling, I want you to consider a slight modification to that old saying, “Measure once, Sell twice as much.”

When working with sales teams, too often, I run across sales managers and salespeople who don’t really measure any vital information to help them sell.  None!  When I ask them what their measure of success is, most will tell me total sales dollars for the company or local business unit.  While that’s certainly important for the overall business, it doesn’t tell me what each salesperson is doing.  If they do measure something, they might measure the number of sales calls.  Again, this tells us very little about what the salesperson is doing. 

What this really means is that our salespeople are driving blindly into their territory.  They jump in their truck, head out into their territory, sell hard all day long, and get the results they get!

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.  They truly don’t know why it worked or why it didn’t work. 

When it works, we might take credit for the success.  We must be good at sales!  We might shine the credit spotlight on our teammates.  We might even give credit to good luck. 

When it doesn’t work, we may assume that we aren’t as good a salesperson as we thought we were.  We might blame pricing, product performance, or the economy. 

Either way, the results are difficult to repeat if you are not measuring actions.  For example, if you made seven sales calls one day and only one the next, did you get better results on either day?  It’s hard to tell and even harder to attribute.  In general, I’d assume being in front of more customers is better.  However, that’s not a great way to measure. 

One of the main reasons a salesperson or their manager needs to measure is to remove the randomness from the salesperson’s results and hone in on repeatable actions that grow sales!

They are different for every company, territory, and salesperson.  Why? Because every one of them have different territories, with different challenges, and a different set of selling strengths/weaknesses.

Here are my overall favorite data points and questions to set up measurements:

The answers to these questions help to establish key measurements to help you measure your sales performance.  They also allow you to make small, daily adjustments to your actions.  Those consistent, small, daily actions lead to long term sales results.