Sales success is measured by the numbers. The number of meetings scheduled, phone calls made, and deals closed are an important part of any sales organization. What do these numbers really tell us though? Why do we measure them?
In this video, Brad Ansley, a Sales Development Manager here at Salesloft, shares insight into the importance of truly understanding the metrics we measure. Reframing how they are applied can have a big impact on the success of a modern sales organization.
Hey guys, Brad Ansley, Sales Development Manager here at Salesloft and today I wanted to talk to you about how obviously every sales organization is driven by metrics. But, it’s important sometimes to step back and think about the why behind some of those metrics.
Why are you measuring the things that you’re measuring? Are they the right things?
And so, I’m going to talk through some of the things that we’re thinking about in measuring to really ensure that we’re having success in a modern account base model.
Obviously, the most important metric for any sales organization is revenue. But the way to get there is through the inputs, and the inputs are the number of accounts that each rep is working. How do you decide what that number is? Is it arbitrary? A lot of times, for a lot of organizations, they just pick a number of accounts, assign ’em out to reps and expect them to turn those into opportunities. But it’s helpful to be able to understand on a rep by rep basis, what is their account to opportunity ratio?
For every 100 accounts that a rep is working, how many opportunities can you reasonably expect to come out of that? And when you have that on a rep by rep basis, you can be able to say, rep A needs to have 90 accounts to convert 15 opportunities. Whereas, rep B needs about 115 accounts to convert 15 opportunities. So, it helps you really have a more granular understanding of how many accounts each rep needs to be working to get to that revenue number.
Something else that pretty much every sales organization on the planet measures is activity and volume. And what you’re measuring there really is effort. But it’s important to make sure that that effort is going in the right direction. When you’ve built out an authentic multi-channel cadence, the activity’s going to come, because you have those follow-ups already pre-scheduled. But what you need to start focusing on is how many people are you adding to the top of that cadence? Are you adding the right number of people so that you can continue to have fresh conversations within the accounts that you’re targeting?
That’s not to say at all that activity and volume is not important. Only to say that focusing on that leading indicator of the number of new prospects in each of these accounts that you’re adding in every single day is going to actually lead to high volume that’s focused in the right direction, earning you more conversations with the prospects in your target accounts.
Something else that we often measure reps on is the number of meetings that they set. Which is important, because nothing happens until we have an actual conversation. You could have as many meetings in a day as you want, but if they’re not with qualified prospects, if they’re not qualified opportunities, then it doesn’t matter. And I know that sounds elementary, that sounds simple. But that’s often how we measure our reps is the number of meetings they set, or we measure our SDR teams on how many meetings they set for the account executives, and, just shifting your mindset, and even shifting the way you measure it to focus solely on qualified opportunities, and being very strict about that, can help make sure that all of this effort is being put in the right direction.
Those are just some of the ways that we’re reframing how we think about metrics that we’re tracking on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. The things that are super important to make sure that we’re successful.
I would love to hear what you’re doing. What are the things that you’re tracking? I love talking about this stuff and having these conversations. So please, reach out, and let’s figure out what the next metrics that we should be tracking are.