The Process and Tools to Drive Sales Performance

So you’ve set your overall sales goals and your objectives to drive your daily activity. How do you give yourself the best chance of hitting your sales goals. Hitting your sales goals is a function of not only your message but the tools and process you put in place for you and/or your team.

“Hitting your sales goals is a function of not only your message but the tools and process you put in place for you and/or your team.” 

Once you have established your sales goals, you need to put in place a process that regularly measures and manages your sales efforts. This process includes the following elements.

Managing Your Pipeline

You have to put in place the tools to manage your sales efforts. This consists of what is called either a “customer relationship management (CRM) tool” or a “pipeline management tool.” It essentially is a single location that manages all your potential sales opportunities, Your pipeline is the sales process that consists of all the sales steps (called stages) you need to take to turn a person or business into a paying customer. It starts with them being a “lead” or “prospect” (someone who has shown interest in your product or service) and moving them through the sales stages to turn them into a customer. Note that all of the steps outlined in this lecture are standard features of all pipeline management or customer relationship management software. Take into account the following when using this tool:

• Sales Stages. A pipeline consists of various stages of the sales process.Your goal is move potential opportunities through these stages as efficiently as possible. Typical sales stages consist of:
  • Stage 1 – Initial contact: Someone has shown interest in your business from either a phone call or a form completion on your website. These are often called “leads” or “opportunities.”
  • Stage 2 – Discovery: Determining whether a prospect has the potential to be a customer (e.g., shown enough interest in your business and is within your target market).
  • Stage 3 – Call or Meeting: an interaction that outlines the capabilities of your product or service and how it solves their challenge.
  • Stage 4 – Proposal: Send the prospect a proposal outlining why you’re the full package and why it’s good value.
  • Stage 5 – Negotiation: You are discussing the terms of your proposal to determine if this opportunity can turn into a paying customer.
  • Stage 6 – Closed Sale: The prospect has become a customer.
• At the highest level, you want to understand how many opportunities you need to have at each stage of your pipeline to hit your sales goals.
• Probability to Become a Customer. Each stage of the pipeline represents a probability that the prospect will become a paying customer. This is called “probability to close” and is expressed as a percentage. Each stage has a different percentage:
  • Initial contact – 0%
  • Discovery – 10%
  • Meeting – 30%
  • Proposal/order form – 60%
  • Negotiation – 80%
  • Closed sale – 100%
• Pipeline Coverage. To get one customer, you need to be interacting with ten customers – one of which will buy. The process of finding the ten and turning them into the one (and hopefully more) paying customers is your sales pipeline.
• Calculate Goals. It’s important to have an idea of how many deals you win on average, at any stage, so you’ll know whether you are on track to success — at any given moment. This insight into your conversion rates tests your sales process, evaluates whether your sales team is performing at the level you need them to, and exposes where you have very specific needs.

Your goal is to maximize your ability to move potential opportunities “through the pipeline” (from stage to stage). You need to drive the activities at each stage that move your prospects through the pipeline. This could be follow-up calls, sharing marketing collateral or delivering a product demonstration at each stage of the pipeline, When you’re moving your deals stage-to-stage, it’s important to cite what factors help you advance your deal, so you can focus on performing those activities and continue to keep deals flowing in. It could be sending a written proposal, identifying the stakeholders, or getting a budget approved — there’s an event at each stage that moves the deal along.

Linking Activity to Sales Goals

By setting sales goals, you can determine what level of activity you need on a daily basis. You translate this into a series of activities that your measure and drive such as:

• # of outreach emails sent
• # of first contact or follow-up calls made
• # of follow-up emails sent
• # of meetings scheduled or conducted
• # of proposals sent

Moving Opportunities Through The Pipeline

Achieving quota isn’t something that magically happens at the end of the quarter or increasingly at the end of the month. The best salespeople focus on the daily tasks or activities that they know will set them up to achieve their quota. This sales skill is usually learned over time, but it’s invaluable. For example, a sales professional might know that if they have a certain number of meetings with prospects this month, that this will allow them to achieve quota next month.

Managing a Pipeline Like a Portfolio

The best salespeople manage their pipeline much like a hedge fund manager would manage their portfolio. They invest time in a number of opportunities knowing that some will close and some will not. They track the performance of each opportunity, as well as the aggregate performance of their entire pipeline on a weekly, if not daily, basis. They are also able to conduct a “bottoms up” analysis of their pipeline at any time to determine where they sit relative to their quota target.

Process to Manage Goals

With all of your sales efforts housed in a single location, you should then set up a regular and consistent process to manage to sales goals. The should include:

• Weekly Pipeline and Activity Review: each week sit down and review where the company is against its pipeline and also against the goals it sets for weekly activity. If it is just you, review this with someone so you drive some personal accountability.
• Monthly Review: Once per month, meet with a small group of people you trust to review what you’re doing, where you’re headed, what you’ll do in the next month, and get ideas for how you can achieve more and shake off any nagging hassles that are holding you back.
• Quarterly Review: Once per quarter, review your progress toward your annual goal. Set no more than 3 quarterly priorities that you’ll direct all your passion, energy, and intensity toward so you can stay on track to meet your annual targets. During the quarterly meeting, step back and ask yourself, “What do I absolutely, positively need to get done over the next three months to achieve my annual goals?” Define it, commit to it, and set your monthly targets and actions for the next three months.

Aligning Compensation to Your Goals

You must set up the incentive component of compensation packages to align additional compensation to the specific behaviors or results you want to drive. You can’t expect sales professionals to chase opportunity that don’t have financial rewards. So while you are putting the right tools and process in place, don’t for forger that the way you pay your people will likely be the greater driver of results.

The tools, process and compensation you put in place provides you with the structure to effectively drive sales results.