Who are your true top sales performers?

Chances are you don’t even need to look this up. You know. Sales people are measured, KPI’s are in place. Accumulated sales and quota attainment usually tells the story. If we want to get fancier, we can look at win rate, average deal size and sales cycle. If we want to get granular, we can look at different efficiency and effectiveness indicators.

However, it is entirely possible that one of your average performers should be moved up the ladder. The issue with our most common metrics is that they fail to account for long term effectiveness. Let’s take a closer look at two areas worth probing.

Sales Cost

Win or lose, each opportunity pursued requires an investment of time, money and resources. Unfortunately, the sales cost is something we rarely measure in great detail. We may have an idea about the sales cycle, a process for requesting internal resources and ways to allocate expenses to a particular project. However, for a variety of reasons we don’t tend to crunch the numbers in order to generate further insights that would help us take action. If we did, we could uncover answers to the following questions:

What is the average sales cost for the opportunities our sales people pursue (both as a team and at an individual level)? What should it be?

How does the average sales cost compare to the average deal size (team and individual level)? What is an ideal ratio?

How much time and resources from other departments (such as IT and legal) do our sales people utilize for each opportunity, on average? How does the use rate differ between won and lost deals? Should there be a cap?

Using these types of metrics, you may find that a typical “average” performer may very well prove to be the most effective.

Customer Lifetime Value

Your top performers may bring in new orders, but if customers keep cancelling after the minimum contract length (and leave feeling there was a gap between the promise and what was delivered), not only do they need to continuously chase new customers to replace the revenue lost. The absence of referrals, easy upselling opportunities and, let’s not forget, tarnish to your brand and reputation as a trusted advisor are even bigger concerns. 

Have a look at the data and trends. If one of your sales people consistently brings in clients that stay with you for an average of 5 years and has a great track record for upselling, that should be considered. Customers that continually buy more and love what you do are more likely to refer you and strengthening your reputation – and the sales cost of ongoing order taking is, as you might have guessed, very low. 

Customer retainment matters and it all starts with how well the sales person managed the sale. Do your clients cancel quickly and complain frequently, or do they stay happy with you for a long time? 

Winning a deal is not enough in B2B sales. It’s only the beginning. The people in charge of delivering on the promise must be provided with the opportunity to do a great job. Unfortunately, post-sale shortcomings can be hard to measure. Regardless, if the sales person did not iron out all details at the time of signing, or did not involve the relevant internal resources to get everything clarified, project managers risk facing haphazard handovers and antagonistic customers asking for specialized solutions free of charge. 

In conclusion, the metrics you employ determines who you deem to be top performers. In the same way that we must look for the hidden needs of our prospects, so too must we look for the hidden metrics that reveal the true effectiveness of our sales force performance.

To learn more about metrics and sales performance management, contact us today.