How to define sales benchmarks to achieve more consistent performance

In today’s coaches corner, we’re discussing how to achieve better consistency in win rates, cycle times, and deal sizes across your sales team.

Kevin Ascher, Founder and President of Acoustic Selling, joined us to show how Membrain helps his client benchmark and monitor sales activities, in order to coach more effectively and consistently.

Symptom: Fluctuating win rates, cycle times, and deal sizes

Many sales teams experience enormous fluctuations in win rates, cycle times, and deal sizes across the team and for each salesperson.

This makes it impossible to forecast effectively, and leads to unpredictable sales performance

Diagnosis: Unable to coach reps due to unclear benchmarks

In this example, the organization lacked the ability to pull effective data for understanding even very basic metrics.

Without accurate data, they found it impossible to set clear benchmarks. And without benchmarks, there was no way to coach reps to a consistent process or to achieve consistent success.

Prescription: Identify benchmarks, analyze sales activity, and coach accordingly

Ascher worked with the organization to utilize Membrain to establish benchmarks and analyze sales activity for each salesperson.

Membrain allowed them to hold salespeople accountable to the steps in their sales process, and to measure the success of each step.

For instance, an opportunity may progress to a late stage of the process without first completing early activities such as identifying the attitude of influencers or performing preliminary research. When this happens, Membrain makes the missing steps clearly visible, so that the coach can guide the rep to correct the deficiencies and improve future adherence to process.

This transparency helps coaches understand which opportunities are truly on track and which need adjustment, and allows them to coach accordingly.

The result, ultimately, is better consistency across all sales teams, more reliable forecasts, and higher overall performance.