Lesson 49 - Measure Your Success

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Tracking and analyzing your performance as a seller is essential for creating sustainable growth in your performance. This lesson will teach you how to measure success using KPIs, pipeline metrics, and conversion rates. Your assignment will involve calculating your current performance metrics and identifying areas for improvement.

Transcript

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Hill. Welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to create a reporting dashboard to measure your success. Now, as a sales professional, it's crucial that you understand your conversion ratio and how you're doing throughout the different areas of the sales funnel. Basically, you need to understand how you get to your quota and every step of the way you should be measuring your activity and how things are going, so that you can see where the gaps are. Now, before we talk about what actually needs to be on this dashboard, let's talk about the difference between a leading indicator and a lagging indicator. A leading indicator, those are the things that are typically within your control, or at the at the very least, they're more within your control. So when you think about a leading indicator, think about something like, how many emails did you send this week? How many phone calls did you make? How many account plans did you fill out? How many LinkedIn connection requests did you send? Those are all things that are within your control. So if you increase these leading indicators, chances are those will lead to an increase in lagging indicators. Lagging indicators are typically the things that you stress out over. So think about the number of pipeline you've generated and the number of recurring revenue that you've closed, right or the amount of business that you've closed, those are typically the two biggest lagging indicators. You should care about both, and you should definitely measure and manage both. But keep in mind that leading indicators are the things that are within your control, and so you should absolutely be looking at, how can I increase my leading indicators, and then how can I increase the conversion ratio from those leading indicators into the later steps of the funnel? That's going to make more sense once we actually get into what needs to be on this report. So let's go ahead and take a look. The first thing that you want is measuring your activity to meeting ratio. So now we're at the very top of the funnel right now. So you need to be looking at the volume of outreach you're doing, which is going to be emails, LinkedIn messages, connection requests, calls and voicemails. So anytime you're reaching out to a customer, check that off. That's a that's a an activity, right? The key metric you want to track here, though, is your outbound success rate, which means, how often does your outreach result in a meeting? How often does the outreach you're sending, the voicemails you're leaving, the calls you're making, the emails, the LinkedIn, all that, how often does that lead to a meeting. One of my controversial opinions is that I do not care about open rates, click rates, or reply rates. Those metrics are fairly useless to me. I think you should be looking at outreach to meeting conversion rate. And if your outreach to meeting conversion rate is low, you should be looking at your outreach to understand how you can improve your messaging. If you really want to get strategic, I would actually, instead of looking at like, open rate, click rate, reply rates, I would look at outreach to meeting conversion and outreach to Director, plus meeting conversion rate. So how often are you meeting with those members of the right altitude that you want to get to? So activity to meeting ratio number two, meeting to demo conversion rate. So this is the measure of how many of your initial meetings are leading to a deep dive technical demonstration or solution demonstration. And if this number is low, oh, actually, let's go back a second. A second ago, I talked about the measuring your activity to meeting ratio. If that number is low, you need to improve your outreach messaging or your outreach frequency, or you need to get more strategic with the contacts you're reaching out to. So it's one of those three things, right? You're either not reaching out enough, you're not reaching out with effective messaging, or you're not reaching out to the right people. So if your outreach to meeting set is low, those are the three things you need to look at. Sorry, I almost missed that. Number two, meeting to demo conversion rate. So how many of those initial meetings are leading to a demo? If that number is low, you need to look at your discovery. Are you articulating your value clearly on that first call? Are you having a two way conversation and aligning on their pain? Are you addressing their needs effectively? Because if you're not, then you need to take a look at the discovery questions the initial pitch. You should also review your calls to understand how much you're talking versus how much you're listening. And you should review the content that you're getting across to make sure it doesn't just seem like salesy, for lack of a better word, right? If all you're doing is throwing stats up on a screen and talking about there was. Studies, then you're not really selling. You're just talking. So you need to get in front of them with the right messaging. You need to be listening to them, understanding their needs. And that will lead to more technical demonstrations. So look at the meeting to demo conversion rate. Then look at your demo to evaluation conversion rate. Now for most people, this would be like demo to business case conversion rate. How often do you after doing a demo lead to an effective business case? That was bad grammar, but you know what I mean, right? How often does that bit that demo lead to an effective ROI call or business case call, or if your solution goes through some other sort of evaluation, like a proof of concept or pilot or whatever, then look at that conversion rate. But this should be one number, and what you're doing, you'll notice, what I'm doing is I'm just going down the funnel. I'm looking at how often does activity lead to a meeting, how often does the meeting lead to a demo? How often does the demo lead to the business case? And then finally, oh, and by the way, if that number is low, you need to review your demos. So how are your solution architects doing? Are you aligning with them on what your client or prospect needs? Are you highlighting differentiated features that only your solution can provide? Are you taking out your competitors during that technical demonstration? Are you tailoring them to their decision criteria, which you should have already aligned on so that? But again, that's why we track all these different numbers. Because now you can say, okay, it's not my activity because that's leading to meetings. It's not my meeting because that's leading to demos. So it's my demo, you can see exactly where in the funnel you're struggling. And then you go into your business case, if you're then you should be looking at, how often does my business case meeting lead to a closed one deal, or how often does you know that step in the evaluation process lead to a closed one deal. So how many of your business case presentations are resulting in revenue? If that number is struggling, you need to review your business case presentation. Are you presenting ROI in a compelling way? Are you providing case studies, third party results, testimonials? Are you are you passing the sniff test, right? Are these numbers logical? Are you is the economic buyer in the room, right? Do you have the right stakeholders? Is it procurement, legal, finance, all of the people that can that can throw a wrench in your deal? Are they engaged? Have you addressed their needs? Ultimately, you need to understand how often do my business cases, or, you know that next step in the evaluation, how often do they lead to a closed one deal? Um, in my opinion, that is enough for now. I see a lot of sales people that will they'll either do one of two things wrong. They either won't measure anything, which is a terrible way to do business. You're just relying on gut instinct, and yeah, that'll get you some place, but it won't get you as far as you could go. You need to be measuring these numbers. You need to be understanding where in the funnel you're failing or falling behind. But the other thing that I see salespeople do is that they don't measure or they measure too much. They'll come in and say, well, I need to measure the exact amount of calls, emails, LinkedIn, connection requests. How many meetings Am I getting? How often am I meeting with directors, C levels, VPS, which discovery questions are getting the right amount of traction? How many business case calls have I had this month? They're measuring themselves to death. And in my opinion, if you can get these five numbers that we've talked about, and actually, I think we've only talked about four numbers, um, yeah, we've only talked about four numbers. The fifth one, the bonus number that I would track, is your compete win percentage. So you should be looking at when a competitor is present, how often am I winning against them? Now? Why am I saying to measure that? Because you need to understand your differentiation messaging against the competition. You are always competing, and you cannot fall too far behind, because if you fall too far behind, your solution dies. Your solution is dead in the water. Your people will start leaving you in droves. You don't want that. What you want is to constantly be alert to how often you're winning against your competitors. Make sure that you're still at the top. And the way to do that is to look at your compete win percentage. If that compete win percentage is low. Check your product make sure that your product isn't falling behind. Work with your product team, let them know where the gaps are, and check your messaging, check your ability to deliver on those differentiators, and let people know that that your product is better, right? Are you? Are you really putting your. Best Foot Forward against your product so compete win percentage is another one. Don't get bogged down in granular metrics. Focus on those five metrics, and that will help you strategize your improvements. The other thing I would recommend is that these metrics should be on one easy to read dashboard, one place. Even better if you can color code them green, yellow, red. You want this to be visual, simple, effective. You don't want to have to be going back and forth to 1015, different Looker Tableau, Power BI dashboards in order to try and find something, this should be in one spot, easy to read. Here's your five numbers, and you can track them on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis. That's fine, but you should be able to see these five numbers at a glance, very simply. Another effective way to measure your success is to run AB tests. I do recommend running AB tests. You're never going to be able to know if one if message, some messaging is better than other messaging, if one email is better than another email, if one discovery question is better than another discovery question, unless you test it again, don't go on gut instinct all the time, right? That will only get you so far. Test, validate, report, measure. You need to be going in and saying, Okay, I'm going to send these emails to this persona and these emails to this other persona, and I'm going to test the difference. I'm going to test which one performs better. Now I'm testing which persona performs better, then I'm going to say, Okay, now I'm going to send email a and email b to the same personas and see which email performs better. Then you say, Okay, I'm going to be having calls with these industries. I'm going to test this discovery question bank versus this discovery question bank. Further down the funnel, you go in and say, Okay, I'm going to try demo experience a, which focuses more on Discovery and interaction, versus demo experience B, which focuses more on custom, tailored case studies and deep dive technical demonstration. You don't know which one of those is going to be better until you test it. So you need to go in and do some AB tests. A lot of sales tools will help you set up AB tests, like outreach is a very popular one. You can set up AB tests on outreach. So these tests are not perfect. It's not like you're running a controlled, double blind study here, but I would encourage you to test things out, even at a basic level, and start to understand what's working better. All right, now it's your term for today's assignment. You are going to create a personalized reporting dashboard that tracks each stage of your sales funnel. You're going to analyze your current metrics. You'll identify where you're excelling and where there's room for improvement, and you'll develop a strategy to optimize each stage where you've fallen behind. You'll also conduct an AB test on one part of your sales process that could be your outreach messaging, your demo delivery, etc. You'll measure which approach yields better results once you've measured or once you've built your dashboard. Check in with your manager, your mentor, your new hire buddy. Ask them if there are any other metrics that they think you should track and check with your sales ops team. If you have like an operations team or a reporting or dashboarding or data team, they might be able to help you. I will tell you, in my experience, they're normally pretty slammed, and they're not normally able to help with individual one off dashboards like this. But there are a lot of resources, YouTube videos, Udemy, Coursera videos that will help you with data dashboarding, and what you're building isn't that hard, so I would encourage you to kind of get your feet wet. Build this dashboard yourself, if you can, and then check it with your manager to see if anything else needs to be on there. Your study guide will walk you through this, and that's it for today's lesson on the daily quota. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time you.