Measure Results

Hey, Scott from The Sales Mastermind here. Today’s edition only takes 4 minutes.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” - Peter Drucker.

It’s the most cliché line in business … and it’s true.

Storytime

I’ve built CRM-based dashboards for sales teams more times than I can count. It’s automatic by now.

The core tracking is month-over-month, and by seller, comparisons of:

• Inbound leads and outcomes
• Outbound activity activity
• Deals created
• Deal outcomes (won/lost)
• Revenue won

Then anything specific to that business - for example, deal tracking by stage or deals/leads without an activity for 3-7 days.

Recently, a customer asked me for help, but their CRM’s reporting engine is.... bad.

So, we’re building a dashboard in Next.js, meaning I get to rethink every element, including what data to include, why, how to compare it, and where to source the data.

The list I came up with is below (removing anything identifying):

• Inbound leads - accepted/not accepted, by source
• Outbound activity by rep - total, dials, emails, meetings
• Meetings Booked by rep - outcome, show/no show rate
• Pipeline Created - by number of deals, by rep, by inbound/outbound, by source
• Deal outcome by rep - won or lost
• Number of Deals Won by rep - by inbound/outbound, by source
• Revenue of Deals Won by rep
• Table of all deals closed with: Company Name, Close Date, Rep, Total Rev, Lead source, and Create Date.

Reporting

Great sales reporting tracks three phases of the buying journey:

• Lead Generation
• Pipeline/Deals Created
• Revenue Won

Lead Generation

Moving buyers from oblivious to curious is often the most challenging phase.

But sales only begins when there are buyers to speak to. In every business, leads either come from:

• Outbound activity by the sellers
• A marketing team generating inbound interest
• Or a mix

For dashboard purposes, Lead Generation encompasses everything that occurs before a buyer truly engages (however you define that in your business). As soon as they engage positively, it moves to:

Pipeline Created

When tracking pipeline creation, you can either measure a number - for example, five deals created - or a revenue amount - for example $100,000. Both are valid; many organisations track both.

Pipeline Created tracks everything from when a buyer says “Yes, tell me more” to when a buyer is closed, won or lost. However, you define these in your business.

Closed Won

Ultimately, sales is about closing deals and adding revenue to the bottom line.

Therefore, tracking deal outcomes and the value of deals won by a seller is the most critical metric for any dashboard.

Most companies track this on a revenue basis at the very least.

Over Time

All reporting is mediocre at first. The data is lacking specific detail, there is duplication, and there is just crap that needs to be filtered out.

A different client is about to hire their second sales rep and wants to set targets. However, you can’t simply decide to create a sales target; every target needs historical data to be useful.

Therefore, to begin with, we started tracking sales achievements (deals closed and revenue closed) every month, comparing them to the same period the previous year.

Still, there are no targets.

Once we have 4-6 months of data, we will add a soft target and iterate quarterly.

Then, after a whole year, we’ll have defined targets that the entire team can be confident in.

Whenever you create sales targets/goals/KPIs, ensure you’re open to revising them regularly, at least every quarter initially. Otherwise, the target intended to empower the team may actually disenfranchise them.

If you’ve not already, start reporting on something today and iterate over time. If you are already reporting, ensure that you have covered the three phases of sales, from lead generation to pipeline creation to closed won.

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