Lesson 35 - Learn the Metrics

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Metrics are the foundation of value-based selling. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to identify and leverage key metrics that matter to your prospects. Your assignment will involve researching and documenting metrics for one of your top accounts.

Transcript

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Nick welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to learn all about metrics. This is the first of several lessons that are going to be diving into the med pick framework, and ultimately, we'll be covering every area of med pick, starting with the letter M. So metrics is all about the quantifiable impact that you're making on your prospects. It is the justification for why they're purchasing your software. And when you think about metrics, these are going to be different based on what you're selling. So the goal is for you to step back and say, what are the metrics that if our prospect were to look at our software one year from today, they would have expected to improve upon so if I'm a sales rep for Salesforce, for example, Salesforce is a CRM platform, right? It's meant to improve your sales. So the first thing I'm going to do is say, What is my what is what is a customer trying to do with my product? Well, with Salesforce, they're trying to improve their sales, so they probably care about things like sales conversion rates, customer retention rates, sales cycle lengths, and those could be the top three metrics that they're looking to achieve by implementing Salesforce, and they would expect that they should be able to take a snapshot of these three metrics before implementing Salesforce and then take a snapshot a year after implementing Salesforce and see some sort of measurable improvement. So let's look at a few other examples to kind of drive this home. Let's say that I worked for HubSpot. HubSpot is marketing automation and CRM software. The metrics that a prospect might be looking to achieve or improve upon with HubSpot are lead conversion rate, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, or CAC. So those might be the top three metrics there. Let's say that I worked for Zendesk. Zendesk is a Customer Support Platform. The top three metrics that a customer might be looking to impact with Zendesk, our first response time, right when someone reaches out for support. What is our first response time, customer satisfaction score, or CSAT and ticket resolution time, so overall time to resolving a ticket. Let's say that I worked for workday. Workday is human capital management, so it's HR or people team software. So for workday, I might be thinking about employee turnover rate. I might be thinking about our time to hire. How long does it take for us to get through the recruitment cycle? I might be thinking about the employee engagement score, how satisfied are our employees? And then finally, my favorite example, Sprout Social Social Media Management Software, a company might be looking to improve upon their social post engagement rate, their follower growth over time, their post reach, their overall kind of marketing social media reach, or the amount of time saved on managing social media accounts. So when we're thinking about the different solutions and the different metrics that those solutions impact, it really comes down to three things. All of the metrics that you're looking for can usually be tied back to three major initiatives at any organization. And I've mentioned them before, but I want to mention them again here, increasing costs or increasing cost don't increase cost, increasing revenue, so increasing the amount of revenue that a customer is realizing from your solution decreasing cost or mitigating cost, right? You want to reduce the amount of cost that you're spending on whatever it is your solution is, is helping to provide and mitigating risk. Now mitigating risk actually confused me when I first started in sales, increasing revenue, decreasing cost. Those are pretty intuitive, but mitigating risk basically means taking any action necessary to reduce the potential negative impacts that could harm your business. So an example of this might be, you know, you can have financial risk, you can have operational risk, you can have reputational risk, you can have compliance related risk, if you're installing customer support. Software like Zendesk, you're probably looking to reduce your reputational risk. You want to make sure your company can ensure quick and efficient resolution of customer issues, right? So customer has a problem, they reach out. They're starting to think you have a bad reputation, but suddenly your support person answers. They answer in a timely manner. They answer to the customer satisfaction, and your reputation is saved, right? So reputational risk, a robust CRM like Salesforce can help track customer interactions data that can help track data more accurately, which reduces the risk of errors, and that could help you with unforeseen kind of compliance related risks or lost sales. So when you think about mitigating risk, it could mean a lot of different things, but ultimately it's about protecting the business in ways that are not directly related to revenue or cost. All right, in the next lesson, we're actually going to talk about how you can build an ROI calculator to show return on investment. But for now, it's your turn. Your assignment for today is to take a step back and view your product through the eyes of your customer, what are they trying to achieve at a high level by buying your product? That shouldn't be hard. You've already done that in a few different lessons at this point, but I want you to take it a step further and think of four quantifiable metrics, numbers, measurable metrics, that would prove to a customer that they made the right decision by buying your software. What metrics would they if you were to show them when one year that you had improved these four metrics? What would make them say, Wow, that was an incredibly valuable purchase. We did it right work with your manager mentor or new hire buddy. What I would do, too is I would actually take it a little further, and I would tie each of those four metrics to either increased revenue, reduced cost or mitigated risk. Your study guide will help you with this. Work with your manager mentor or new hire buddy, and that is it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time bye. You.