If you’re a Senior Sales Executive or Sales Manager, you’re deluged with data that you need to digest, synthesize, and use to manage your sales department more effectively. The most important metric is usually the revenue generated by the sales person – but even that has subsets of data. Are you measuring year-to-date compared to last year? Actual revenue versus target revenue? Revenue to forecast? Revenue profit versus cost-of-sales? As you can see, there are many data sets that can be plotted and graphed. Many companies rely solely on the produced revenue stream as their only metric for sales performance and compensation. While this works well to differentiate the winners from the losers, it doesn’t do anything to lift up the organization as a whole – let alone inspire any esprit de corps.

Companies often set hard and soft sales goals, and many measure the number of each sales reps’s subset activities: the number of phone calls, emails, lunches etc. The old adage ‘it’s just a numbers game’ is somewhat true. But when asked to show activity, the average sales rep will do just that; they’ll show they are active by spending valuable sales time filling our activity sheets, WIIFM forms, and CRM funnel data – but not really delivering what is the pinnacle of all that sales activity, the live face-to-face presentation. This is where more business is won and lost than any other single sales activity.

So what should the senior sales executive measure? What would be the most insightful but least data-inclusive metric? Obviously it should be the result or outcome of their sales pitches. Knowing which salesperson pitched to which company, and the specific outcomes of those pitches, will quickly tell the senior manager, who is doing the most presentations, who is wining business and who isn’t.

Getting that information in one report would dramatically improve the senior executive’s ability to see where client or prospects relationships are, and where they are going, without a lot of superfluous data.

And with this information two very important management steps can – and should be – taken. The first is to determine why the top performers are performing so well, and then duplicate these tactics as ‘best practices’ for all the other reps. Secondly, the ones who aren’t performing need to be assessed, and their performance gaps identified and understood, with specific and targeted training to close these gaps.

For the Senior Sales Executive to be able to quickly and accurately determine where his or her sales department is excelling – and where it’s not – shouldn’t require a lot of activity information – just the correct activity information.

The metrics you need are exactly what you’ll get with the Perfect Pitch presentation management system. Get in touch and find out more.