The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders | Sales managers frequently focus on and only consider the actual sale when evaluating the performance of their sales teams.

Of course, it's crucial to close deals with prospects, but that's just one piece of the picture. When assessing the sales performance of their teams, sales leaders must consider Leading, Lagging, and Real Time KPIs.

Since the sale's closure is a lagging indicator, if you aren't closing sales every day, you might already be in trouble.

So how do we, as sales leaders, develop reliable metrics that help us assess the actions needed now to increase sales both now and in the future? The use of and administration of key performance indicators, or KPIs for short, specifically by controlling the Leading, Lagging, and Real-Time indicators, provide the solution. 

These three essential factors will guarantee that your sales funnel and future business are strong. They offer a method of measuring that is objective and, when used properly, enables you to glimpse into the future, changing course quickly or removing obstacles within your team.

As a sales leader, you must decide how you will accurately monitor these KPIs and make sure your team understands the difference between a sales forecast and a sales funnel. 

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

While a forecast is a subset of the pipeline that only comprises qualified opportunities that are anticipated to close within a given time frame, a sales funnel offers clear visibility into all of your opportunities, regardless of their likelihood of closing.

It is simpler to predict the future success of your sales team when your sales process is organised and your team has access to useful tools and benchmarks thanks to a clearly defined funnel and its sales stages. In fact, by using KPIs, you'll be able to determine not just how your team is doing right now, but also what challenges they are facing.

When properly implemented, a sales forecast becomes another tool for forward planning that you can use to create budgets, spend money, track how well leads are converted, determine the cost per lead, and help you predict sales in an acceptable and precise manner.

Each sales manager needs to track the following:

Leading indicators - Development of the funnel

• Length of sales cycle

• The quantity of hot, qualified leads.

• Offers to suitably qualified potential clients

• The overall time required to qualify a new prospect.

• Amount of monthly encounters with new (first-time) clients

• The ratio of unqualified leads to qualified leads and conversion rates

Sales managers must track the conversion rates from each stage of the sales process in addition to the opportunity-to-close ratios of their teams. You can determine whether you will be ahead or behind your company's sales goals by keeping an eye on the length of your sales cycle, the number of new. The frequency of your monthly customer meetings and the percentage of fresh leads that turn into qualified leads. You can then make adjustments as quickly and effectively as possible when necessary to ensure the achievement of those goals.

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

Quota-focused indicators for the future

• Sales volume for each quarter and year

• Recommendation to close ratio

• Size of typical sales

• Comparison of new and old clientele

• A yearly sales cap

Real-time metrics: customer management, retention, and expansion

• An average client increase from quarter to quarter

• Rates of client retention

You can require more KPIs depending on your particular line of business. Checks cut per client may be measured by a payroll service.

The most effective sales leaders base KPIs on data. Each KPI should have a suitable benchmark that is based on actual data obtained from historical sales data, or if your business is just getting started or is relatively new, use benchmarks from your specific industry. 

To help you determine averages and quotas, review your sales from previous months, quarters, or years. You may determine with great accuracy how many opportunities your team will need to have in the funnel in order to surpass your sales quotas in a very objective and process-driven way by first knowing your average deal size and then combining that with lead conversion rates.

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

Once you have defined your measurements, they are only beneficial if you actually use them. Know every one of your KPIs, and check the data every week. Control the system and keep an eye out for any trends, both bad and good, so you and your staff can respond effectively.

It's crucial to involve your sales team in this process; at your weekly coaching session, go over each person's KPIs. This will enable them to immediately make modifications based on data, spot any concerns with their performance early, and understand what is vital.

Simple Method Ensured to Boost Sales

Most sales managers and business owners tend to concentrate on increasing close ratios when looking for strategies to boost sales. While doing so is a sensible strategy, it might be difficult to increase a sales team's close ratio. On the other hand, expanding the sales team's opportunities is a relatively simple operation.

If the sales team generates 100 opportunities per week and has a closure percentage of 40%, the outcome is 40 closes or sales. It's difficult to raise the close ratio to 60% within the weekly 100 opportunities. On the other hand, if the sales team's weekly opportunities are doubled to 150 and their close percentage stays the same at 40%, 60 sales will be made each week.

In other words, both options lead to the same outcome, but boosting opportunities is simpler than raising the close ratio. Because it is designed with the straightforward goal of giving salespeople more opportunities rather than focusing on increasing closing ratios, the process identified and discussed in the following paragraphs is sure to be effective.

As soon as these few, straightforward improvements and modifications to the selling process are put into place, an increase in sales is likely to be seen right away. The modifications and additions are components of a process, not a method.

As a result, any of the recognised elements can be dealt with and implemented without needing to wait for another element to finish.

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

Give the outside sales team more face time with existing and prospective clients. Consider your company to be a seasoned football team. The running backs are the salespeople.

They deliver the goods (products and services) to both current and potential clients. A sales event (touchdown) is more likely to happen the longer the sales team spends in front of a consumer.

A business owner recently confided in me that his sales were declining and asked for my advice on how to turn things around. He claimed that their business had lately invested in a piece of sales software that he had used successfully in the territory sales division of his mail order business. Before going out to make calls, the software instructed each sales representative to schedule an appointment by calling 50 times per day. 

That amounts to half a day! I only advised the company owner that since his running backs had been on the sidelines for the majority of the first half without contributing a touchdown, he should find other people to place the calls so that his sales team members could make the most of their time interacting with clients.

Set a daily quota for the inside sales team's required number of telephone interactions with current or new customers, or enhance the quota already in place. As was previously indicated, the goal of this approach is to give the sales teams more possibilities.

Establish a daily quota for outgoing calls to current customers to sell products or to potential new clients to present your firm and its products and services if your company has an inside sales force. Increase the number of daily quotas if you currently have them. It's incredible how much of an impact simply one or two extra calls each day will have on sales.

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

Each week, every salesperson must create and submit their sales contact plan. Every excellent salesperson has a plan for the day, the week, and the weeks that will come after. Every excellent and superior sales representative shares this strategy with the sales manager. Every excellent and superior sales representative understands the value of offering this pertinent marketing knowledge.

Most other sales representatives only actually have plans for a day or two at most. It's where I should go and what I should do today, you know. Planning in that way does not help to boost sales. To guarantee greater sales, some kind of systematic routine reporting and planning feedback must be put in place.

For many years, I used a rolling four-week calendar layout report as a sales manager with tremendous success. It was delivered to me every Friday afternoon without fail. Week one revealed which businesses and clients the sales representative interacted with throughout the week that was about to conclude. 

Week two revealed the sales representative's schedule for the week beginning on Monday, including where they would be and who they would meet with. There were no open days, exclamation points, or maybe in the week's full schedule.

Three and four weeks were unsure. Again, no blank days were allowed, but as these were only tentative plans for two weeks, there might be a few lingering doubts and maybes.

In addition to learning valuable marketing information from these reports, the sales representatives improved their time management abilities. Additionally, it taught them how to look ahead and plan. These behaviours are wonderful at helping to close deals, thus every sales manager will value them.

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

Instead of simply reacting, sales representatives should take action and rely more on their support team members. When questioned, most, if not all, sales representatives would say that providing excellent customer service is their top priority. Their behaviours lend credence to the idea.

As we previously mentioned, the sales representative carries the ball for the company as the running back. The fact that the sales representative is a closer by definition accounts for the majority of why they carry the load.

The sales representative's responsibility is to close sales of goods and services to clients, or, to put it another way, to score touchdowns.

Customer service is a crucial component of the sales satisfaction mix, but it is everyone in the company's responsibility, not simply that of the sales agent. Even if they are at the location of another customer, most sales representatives will pause what they are doing to address a customer complaint when they call with a problem or complaint.

I have always believed that the customer I am currently working with is more important than everything or anyone else in the world.

In addition, some sales representatives will actually deliver customers' items rather than depending on conventional delivery systems. This is a highly terrible practice, especially if the sales representative is not delivering the goods in a company-owned car.

There are simply too many dangers of harm and mishap. Thankfully, a lot of liability insurance providers strongly advise against or don't cover this technique.

Business owners and sales managers must rely on support team members to handle deliveries and help with customer service issues if they want to increase sales. Closers must continue to do their closing tasks.

Cut down on "Windshield time." I kept track of the amount of time we spent in the car when I travelled with a sales representative. I would give the sales representative the sum at the conclusion of our time together.

It was frequently a mind-boggling sum that was undoubtedly eye-opening. A long travel time from one consumer to another was occasionally, and frequently depending on the metropolitan region, something that truly couldn't be regulated very well. 

Since that was frequently not the case, I took the opportunity to teach the sales representative the lesson I had picked up from my management while serving in my first region.

Plan client calls for each day to be as close together as possible. This is the message or lesson. The balance of the salesperson's day should be spent in or close to Middletown if he has an appointment with a client there.

The Importance of Leading and Real Time Indicators for Sales Leaders

Look for and discover fresh business prospects. Adding a new product to an existing customer or acquiring a new customer are two frequent definitions of new business. It's also possible to classify resuming dormant product sales to a current client as a new business.

The hardest part of the procedure might be this step. Sales representatives frequently get into a comfortable pattern and focus nearly entirely on meeting the demands of their current clients. However, expanding the window of opportunity for a sale cannot be restricted to current clients.

Business owners and sales managers should demand new business sales rather than merely encouraging them. Sales representatives must keep track of all interactions and meetings with potential new clients.

It could be appropriate to set a goal of reaching out to one or two possible new clients each week. It will undoubtedly produce results. In fact, of all the process's components, the source of new business opportunities can have the most revenue potential.