Managing Your Sales Funnel Game
Sales success is all about managing your “sales funnel game.” As you know, sales are driven by the number of qualified leads and opportunities moving into the top of the funnel leading to more closed sales.
Research shows that 60% of performance is driven by two factors:
- Clear expectations and real-time information
- Tools to manage performance
So, every sales professional needs more than a pipeline spreadsheet to create transparency and accountability to drive performance and revenue targets. Below is the purpose of performance measures and the two keys to managing sales success.
Purpose of Performance Measures
Just as in the game of football, teams drive success with a series of performance measures such as first downs, yards per pass, and red zone efficiency. These indicate how well the team is doing on their game scoreboard.
Your team has a series of performance measures that contribute to your team’s ultimate score. This sales performance measurement tool provides a central real-time scoreboard for communicating and evaluating your most important measures.
Performance Measures: Leading and Lagging Indicators
With our sales performance tool you can monitor two key measurement types:
1.Outcome Measures (OM): Ball Game Over For Now
Answers the question, “How do we evaluate our overall performance? In football we ask, “What is our win/loss record?”
These are the lagging indicators of success and are a historical view of performance when it is too late to improve results for the quarter.
2. Process Measures (PM): Ball Game Still On For Now
Answers the question, “What tells us how we are doing in our daily routine work well enough to achieve our overall performance. In football we ask, “How often are we converting on third down?” and “What is the score right now?”
These are the leading indicators of success for monitoring sales daily work while a sales team can still improve monthly and quarterly results.
Here’s the Expectations Your Team Needs
Target: Ideal performance (we convert 75% of our third downs into first downs)
Green: Performance needs or exceeds intended target (we outperformed the league average on third down conversions)
Yellow: Caution and monitor closely (we are converting only 50% of third downs)
Red: Action needed now (we are converting less than 50% of third downs)
Managing Your Sales Funnel Game Plan
Best regards,
Kelly Ferguson, Chief Operating Officer