Questions You Should Be Asking

There are certain key metrics that are indicators that your sales process is on or off track. Keep an eye on these metrics and ask yourself the following questions as you look to improve your sales process.

  • Opportunities.ย Do you have enough open opportunities to close new business and did this number increase in line with your projections that you used to set quota? This guides you to make sure you are spending enough effort on prospecting – bringing in new opportunities that may become customers.
  • Sales Cycle.ย You sales cycle is how long it takes form the time you connect with a prospect until you close a sale.ย What is you average sales cycle and is it longer or shorter than expected? Is your deal size affecting the sales cycle (i.e., larger deals take longer than smaller deals). You should also look to measure the average time it takes a deal to pass through each stage of the sales pipeline. Minimize your sales cycle by identifying at which stage in your sales funnel you are seeing bottlenecks and know that for each sales rep. This will inform you which skills you should coach and improve. By arming yourself with this important sales cycle information, you can quickly eliminate sales bottlenecks and give direction to your team on how they should invest their time.

“We WILL be there with you every step of the way.”ย 

  • Time Spent Selling.ย Am I (or my sales team) spending enough time selling? Take the time to measure how much time your reps actually spend selling. Time, after all, is the most precious commodity of the sales rep. Look to eliminate sales roadblocks and administrative tasks.
  • Win Rate.ย Did your win rate stay within the acceptable range that you expected or was it higher or lower than expected? And why? Did it drop because deals were larger? Did it drop because you were selling to a new market? Keeping track of opportunity win rate gives you some insight into the ability of your reps to close a deal.

These sales metrics are worth keeping an eye on as they will alert you to trends and also allow you to forecast better in the future.

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