How to Know If Your Team Is Producing The Intended Results

A sales leader must do more than just provide their team with the tools and resources they need to sell well. A sales leader must also ensure their team’s efforts are producing the intended results.

Tracking a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is a good way to do this but how do you know which KPIs to monitor?

In our next few blog articles we will discuss the KPIs every sales leader should assess.

KPI #1: Time Spent Selling

It’s simple: the more time your sales team spends selling, the more sales they will close. How much time does a typical salesperson actually spend selling, though? A study found only about 35.2% of their time! The rest goes to tasks like administration, call and customer data logging, searching for and personalizing content, and filling out expense reports.

Sales leaders should track the time their reps spend in different programs, such as email, CRM, prospecting tools, and HR and content management portals. This can be done manually, but the results will be much more objective if a program that automatically tracks these activities is used. The time tracked should then be taken as a percentage of a reps’ day to determine how much time is actually spent selling.

If a rep is found to be spending too much time on non-client-facing activities, the sales leaders can integrate siloed programs, eliminate manual processes, and give the rep access to resources that increase efficiency, thus resulting in more sales.

KPI #2: Content Accessibility

Today’s buyers have more access to information than ever before. This includes the information typically delivered through a sales interaction. Because of this, buyers expect sales interactions to be more consultative and engaging. It is critical, therefore, that sellers give prospective customers speedy access to the right content and resources.

Similar to the above KPI, content accessibility shouldn’t become too time-consuming, though. The amount of time sellers spend accessing, creating, personalising, delivering and updating content should be tracked to maximise efficiency. Most content management systems allow users to track this data, and email and CRM data also reveals a lot about content accessibility.

Measuring content accessibility can help to reduce the time sales reps spend searching for and personalizing content. Sales leaders can take this KPI a step further by using content accessibility data to improve their sales reps’ ability to easily access and share the right materials at the right time.

KPI #3: Training and Coaching

More sales leaders are catching on to the importance of training and coaching, but a lot still fail to actually measure whether their training and coaching is proving effective.

For example, a lot of organizations throw employees into workshops but don’t determine whether the workshop was effective or was even needed in the first place. Before enrolling team members in a workshop, managers should conduct individual assessments to ascertain which employees should attend, if any. Employees that do attend the workshop should be asked for feedback after the event.

A great way for a sales manager to measure their effectiveness as a coach is to ask their team questions about the latest products, services, industry data and content. This allows managers to identify areas they should be focusing on as a coach.

Stay tuned for next week’s article on three more KPIs every sales leader should assess! We invite you to follow our LinkedIn Page for more insights and weekly tips.