[E95] Sales Tech Week: Reporting and KPIs

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.

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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.