The Sales Activity Management Secret to Increasing Revenue
Crucial metrics are provided by sales activities when evaluating the performance of your team. This covers the quantity of VP-level meetings, sales calls, newly qualified prospects, and so forth. You may affect sales targets and company outcomes by managing sales activities effectively.
You must establish objectives for your sales operations and monitor the performance of your team while developing your plan. This article will teach you how to manage the sales activities of your team and about some helpful applications.
Motives for Monitoring Sales Activity: Enhanced Income
Managing sales activities can boost revenue for your team. You may build a framework for your sales representatives to close more deals by determining the essential tasks they complete each day, monitoring them, and giving them the resources to make the most out of them.
Simplified Procedures
Keeping sales activity management in focus entails separating out the activities that don’t lead to deals. Your team’s workflow can be made more efficient by identifying the tasks that consistently result in victories and developing a clear set of criteria and procedures for achieving them.
If you have a representative who performs extraordinarily well, for instance, you can examine her daily actions, figure out what makes her successful, and share that information with the team.
Boost the spirits of the team
Your salespeople will find the day-to-day easier to handle and be thrilled when the transactions start coming in if they are aware of the precise tasks that will lead to success.
Reps gain authority from managing sales activity since it frees them up to concentrate on the areas they can directly influence. A good sense of rivalry among the team can also arise from sales activity management, particularly if the important activities that result in sales can be made more like games.
Enhanced Reporting and Visibility
Management of sales activities provides enhanced insight into the functioning of your team. Let’s take a scenario where you didn’t meet the revenue target for the Q. You can immediately correct course and determine where you are lacking if you have identified the essential sales actions.
Keeping an eye on sales activities also means having more organized data to demonstrate to superiors how your work results in increased revenue.
Stated differently, effectively handling the preceding operations is critical to achieving the desired business outcomes. Use these three steps to get started.
Three Steps to Put Sales Activity Management Into Practice
1. Identify the main actions for selling.
Describe the sales processes that result in closed deals. Establish the framework of your sales organization first. Make a note of every selling job and how the sales process uses it.
Do your sales development representatives produce leads and then forward them to account executives? Or are your field sales representatives managing transactions inside their designated territory from beginning to end?
Once your sales team’s organizational structure is established, list the essential responsibilities for each position. Those could include setting up meetings and accepting sales possibilities for a sales development representative. However, for a field sales representative, same tasks could include identifying prospects, having face-to-face meetings, talking with VPs, and sending proposals.
After that, ask your sales representatives and supervisors about their thoughts on important tasks. Find out from high achievers what it is they do every day to achieve success. Talk to other representatives and management about the daily actions that high achievers exhibit.
Make use of this knowledge to design the steps that make up your sales process. After that, present the findings to your group and solicit their input. Involving them can not only boost team buy-in, but they might also highlight important details you’ve missed.
Examine best practices in addition. The same number of prospects may be contacted by two salespeople. But suppose one of those representatives does some research on her prospects, composes customized emails, adds trigger events, and creates unique value offers. She will surpass her peer in success by a wide margin.
Along with setting important tasks, you should discuss selling methods and approaches with your sales team.
2. Reverse-engineer the way you handle sales.
Next, figure out how much of each activity you require to accomplish your objective. Start by focusing on your top priority: revenue.
Assume your average deal size is $35,000 and your annual aim is $70 million in bookings.
$70 million in required income ÷ $35,000 in typical transaction size equals 2,000 agreements.
To achieve a 25% proposal-to-deal conversion rate, your sales team will require 8,000 proposals to be sent out. Consequently, two thousand meetings are needed. Your reps need to talk to 128,000 people in order for those meetings to happen.
Now divide the activity metrics into time periods.
Monthly deals = 167 ÷ 2,000 ÷ year equals 2,000 deals.
8,000 submissions ÷ 12 months = 667 submissions each month
A year with 32,000 meetings is 640 meetings a week.
256 calls per day ÷ 64,000 calls per year
Allocate an equivalent quantity of tasks to every sales representative. Assume your squad consists of 100 reps.
167 monthly deals ÷ 100 representative hours = 2 monthly deals
Monthly 667 proposals ÷ 100 representatives = 7 proposals
Weekly sessions: 640 ÷ 100 representatives = 7 meetings
256 talks ÷ 100 representatives a day is 3 calls daily.
You can now monitor activities by specific sales representative. Give each person a customized scorecard so they can monitor their own performance indicators and decide on their time management strategies.
3. Track data and adjust performance accordingly.
Manage these activity metrics proactively by keeping an eye on them every day and discussing them in your weekly team meetings and one-on-ones. Using a sales activity management system is beneficial as it may automate tracking, determine pace, and notify sales executives when metrics are not fulfilled.
Analyze the data to identify areas in which your sales representatives require additional coaching and where deals become stalled in the process.
Do you see representatives making the appropriate amount of bids but failing to close enough business? They may want assistance with proposal drafting. Is your group scheduling the appropriate amount of calls but not having enough meetings? Teach them to recognize your ideal clients with accuracy.
Consider organizing your team around particular KPIs if they start to lag behind their activity goals. To encourage concentration and teamwork, use stack rankings and customized scorecards. You may identify top achievers and unearth best practices with the activity data you collect.
We must organize our teams around sales activities because they are the only metrics that we have control over. Activity-based selling is the name of this strategy, which is becoming increasingly popular among today’s sales executives. Are you going to be next?
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