How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 2

In last week’s post, How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 1, we talked about how important it is to provide your sales team with the right tools and content. You have to provide your sales reps with the right information if you want them to hit the ground running and close in on those leads.

Sales enablement is a simple way to achieve this. One of the first things you can do as part of the sales enablement process is to teach your team how to measure the right things and why they should be measured.

Measure The Right Things

With a CRM platform like Salesforce for example’s sake, your sales team can basically run a report on anything and everything you can think of. Want to see which accounts belong to who? You got it. Want pipeline projections for Q2 of 2016? Done. Who’s going to win Friday night’s Atlanta Hawks vs. Miami Heat game? No problem.

All of this is great and all, but is your team measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)? Or are you just measuring stuff to measure it?

What’s A KPI?

Key Performance Indicators are signposts along the way that your sales team is doing everything they need to do to be successful. Keeping an eye on your KPIs is one of the best ways to enable your sales team and keep your strategy on track.

So what KPIs should you be keeping track of? There are five in particular that can make a difference in the sales enablement process.

• Lead response time. Speed is essential to increasing your sales reps’ odds of success. Prospects equate a responsive company to a good company. The only question then isn’t when to respond — the answer is as quickly as possible — but who should respond.
  
  There’s no substituting a personal phone call from one of your reps. You can measure this by tracking inbound and outbound phone calls within Salesforce and look at how rapidly your team is responding.

• Follow up contact rate. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” -Thomas, A. Edison.
  
  A National Sales Executive Association Survey found that 48% of sales reps never follow up a second time on a lead. This is important since 10% of sales are closed on the fourth contact and 80% are closed between the fifth and 12th contact.
  
  If you’re a sales manager, you want to look at every lead record that is being worked over time and see multiple calls and leads logged against it. If you want to enable your sales team you’ve got to remind them that perseverance pays off, and they should never give up.

• Clicks on follow-up emails. Take a moment to reflect on some of the best sales follow-up emails you’ve ever opened. The rep who emailed you probably brought something important to the conversation to re-engage you.
  
  Maybe it was a link to a  whitepaper, promotion, or a new pricing page? The point is they put a lot of thought and effort into what they believed would help you close the deal with them. The goal of measuring this KPI isn’t necessarily about click-through-rate. It’s to ensure that your reps are providing your prospects with valuable content.
  
  If you find this isn’t the case, try providing them with some content they can use or make them aware of resources that are already available.

• Opportunity-to-win ration. Can you say for sure how many wins your reps get after bringing prospects to the opportunity stage? Or do you have to ballpark that number?This is an important KPI you should be tracking.
  
  It’s possible to have sales reps on your team that are exceptional networkers and who open doors all over the place, but they stink at closing. If that’s the case, you need to either a) work with them on improving their closing skills or b) move them into a different role so they can open doors for your best closers.

• Social media usage. This isn’t an easy data point to measure, but you need to make sure your sales reps are active on social media. We know that the top sales reps out there use LinkedIn. What isn’t clear is how much contact and what kind of contact make the most difference with potential clients on these platforms.
  
  There aren’t many KPI guidelines in place for measuring social micro-strategies. However, you can rely on your own instincts to define how you want your sales team making connections and using different social media channels.

It’s critical that your sales team understand what KPIs are, which KPIs you want to give special attention to, and why they’re so important to your business. Next time you look at your dashboard, ask yourself if the measurements you see there are actually helping your sales team? And does everyone understand the importance of what’s being measured?
Read How To Enable Your Sales Team – Part 3. It’s a real motivator!