The Metrics of Metrics

We all know that using metrics in a sales organization can be a great thing. After all “what gets measured gets done”, and there’s lots of things we need to get done in sales.

So naturally the first issue is figuring out what you want/need done. Closing more sales is usually the main objective, but there may be others – customer satisfaction, brand awareness, functional cross-selling etc. that may need to be done either on an on-going basis or for limited periods of time. So what you want done can change over time. The next step is figuring out a) which activities directly contribute to your end goals, b) which of those activities are measurable, c) what the measurement is gonna be and d) lastly which activities will get done anyway even if you don’t measure them. This last one may seem weird but you can’t measure everything so why bother your reps having them track something they’re going to do anyway. You also don’t want to be redundant in asking your reps to measure something you can get from other sources – for example, if you get a report showing how many quotes each rep has, you don’t need a metric for that; you already have one.

Whatever metrics you choose to implement should be designed to encourage the actions and behaviors you want in your reps – actions and behaviors that directly lead to more sales (or whatever else your desired end result is). If your best practices show that presenting a proposal face-to-face, rather than via snail mail or e-mail, results in higher closing ratios, measure f2f meetings. If your studies show that prospects close more consistently if you respond to their RFP in under 36 hours, make speed your metric. Whatever you want reps doing better and more consistently is a good activity to measure.

But there can be pitfalls to metrics, too.

First and most egregious, is making the tracking of metrics time-consuming and difficult on your reps. Many of your reps, especially the most successful ones are a) already doing most of these things and so see the tracking process as redundant or b) are successful without doing these things and can’t understand why you’re cutting to their selling time with new reporting. So it’s gotta be painless or so important that it’s worth the pain – theirs and yours.

Second and only slightly less egregious is instituting metrics that you can’t clearly show are valuable in closing sales. For example, making all the reps in your organization make 25 calls a week on an unproven sales channel is a recipe for disaster. Unless you know for a fact that firms have successfully sold essentially similar products in this manner in this channel (or better yet, you have reps that have successfully sold your product in this manner in this channel), do not make this a metric. Attempt it on a smaller scale in order to prove its success. Once you do that, you can roll it out to the company as a whole.

And don’t be afraid to change. If something starts working for one area of the company or one geographic location, spread it around!

Instituting good metrics is one of the best methods you have of ensuring the spread of, and consistency in, the use of your firm’s best sales practices so that everyone can perform as an “A” level rep.

A(nother) Sad Story

This is a true story – names have been changed to protect the innocent (and shield the guilty). There’s a very large, well respected company that has their reps use an internal Sales Force Automation System (SFA) we’ll call SalesSonar. This is a Siebel system, but I’m not gonna blame this on Siebel because I’m sure that, even though there may be some limitations in Siebel systems, most of the faults in this particular installation are self-imposed.

If you asked this company to define what the goals of this SFA system are, they’d say activity tracking, analyzing metrics and data integrity – the usual buzzwords. Let me tell you what they actually get.

Due to “data integrity” issues they’ve made it practically impossible for reps to change data already input, or to erase data. For example, there are three separate entries for one client, whom we’ll call ChoicePoint. There’s Choice Point, ChoicePoint LLC, and CHOICEPOINT. Now you’d think that, if you’ve ever Googled anything, in this situation you’d have been asked “Did you mean ChoicePoint LLC?”, so that you could choose something already entered. Can’t do that. Two of these entries have the same address, one has an old one. Each of the three has different listings of contacts, activities and opportunities. Can any of these things be changed by a user? They cannot. Suppose the firm moves – can one change the address? One cannot. How about if someone leaves one prospect and goes to another – can one move or copy all the previous activities so one can tell what the firm has already done? They cannot. Multiple entries, conflicting addresses and contacts and incomplete activity history. So much for data integrity.

And because the company has strange fears about security (this is a company that flaunts its client lists in its marketing material. Hello?) they refuse to web-enable the application, meaning that reps have to either be in the office or attached to the VPN to access it. And access it they must because the company bases part of a rep’s compensation on their use of the system, which is normally something I’d recommend.

However.

This compensation reduction is based on a rep having X number of “trackable activities” for the month, as reported as of the 10th of the following month. What this means in practice, because the system is practically unusable on an on-going basis, is that on the 9th of every month 90% of the sales force, hundreds of reps, sit in their offices all day inputting their monthly activities. That’s quite the loss of productivity, isn’t it? Considering that there’s ~ 20 work days a month, losing one day is the equivalent of reducing productivity by 5%. And these things are supposed to make us more productive, not less.

What’s more is that in terms of activity tracking, the company can only be sure of what it’s reps are doing, have done, that one day, the 10th. Since reps don’t use the system on an on-going basis, if the organization wants to know what everyone is doing this week (say) they can’t. The 10th of next month they can find out, but not today.

Now of course you’re thinking that this is an isolated example. Well this might be a slightly more egregious example than most, but there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of firms whose implementations of SFA have been so botched that any benefits that would normally be expected are non-existent.

And that is both a shame and a tremendous waste of time, money and talent.

It's 2007, dammit!!

One of the most egregious things that companies do to hamstring their sales efforts is having numerous computer software systems that do not inter-operate; they don't speak to each other.

Let's assume for a moment that it's true* that there isn't one system that you can use in your company that can:
• automate the sales process (CRM)
• send and receive e-mail,
• calendar, and
• track customer and product information for your particular widget.

Even if that's true, there's no reason on God's green earth why you would consider saddling your sales reps (or internal staff for that matter) with software that can't share data. It's 2007 for god's sake!!

I'm sure there are some companies that have it together, but judging from what I see every day, there's not many. A company I'm working with right now uses a CRM system and Lotus Notes. While these two programs can share contacts and appointments (not automatically mind you; you have to specifically force the link and the procedure is different in each program), neither of them can share data with the separate customer/product database**. In other words, once someone actually buys a product, their data and product specs go into this separate silo never to be linked with the sales CRM system or Notes again, unless someone does it manually.

Cross sell much? What happens if you want to sell them something else, or the contact person changes, or they move? Again, it's 2007 - how can you not deploy a unified customer/client database that is one central depository for prospects, clients and their current or future product information?

And I'm not saying this because it sounds like a nice thing to do. Not doing so wastes time and resources, is costing you sales and is frustrating your sales force.

If you want to maximize sales, you should get with the program. It's 2007.



* and I don't believe this is true in 95% of companies. Software can be customized to handle just about any configuration of any product. This process is further aggravated because firms often don't deploy the latest versions or all the capabilities of software they have.
** not to mention the issues with mobile electronics which sync only with Notes, so you've got to remember to sync everything twice (CRM to Notes, Notes to Blackberry) before and after every outing.