Luck or skill? Dissecting your sales results AT YEAR'S END

Sales is all about numbers. For valid reasons, it is a profession focused on tangible results, quota attainment, metrics and weighted pipelines. However, failing to look beyond what we can easily measure and report on won’t help us evolve. To understand what we do well, and what we need to change in order to improve, requires a better understanding of how we arrived at the end result.

When conducting your yearly review, do you run into any of these conundrums?

• We know our win rate, but we don’t really know why we win or lose deals
• We know which reps that exceeded their targets, but we don’t really know why they do
• We have an ideal customer profile, but we don’t know if they are actually our most profitable customers

Let’s pretend we have a team of 5 reps and we’re looking at the most basic (and, I suppose, most important) of measurements: quota attainment. Two reps have exceeded their sales targets and three have fallen short. Question is, how did they get there? Do we have any idea?

One of them may have reached their yearly target only because a huge deal managed to come through just in time, whereas the other exceeded their yearly goals by continuously working with a balanced pipeline of carefully qualified opportunities. 

Three of your team members may have fallen short, but the reasons for them doing so are most likely very different One may not have dedicated enough time towards prospecting – the pipeline never got big enough in order to reach targets. One may have generated a lot of opportunities, only to see the majority of them fall out in the final phase. Your third rep may have relied too much on upselling to a few existing accounts where they have established good relationships. 

In order to reach a different outcome next year, one person will need to take steps to ensure s/he doe not rely on just a few big deals; one would need to improve their prospecting skills and move their feet more in the early stages; one could use training around using better questioning and the last rep would need to branch out from a farming comfort zone and build new relationships. 

Unfortunately, we rarely manage to look behind the numbers and come to the conclusions outlined in the fictitious example above. Too often, we take the easy way out and attribute the level of performance to “talent”, and/or “hard work”. 

The power of why

For 2016, I highly encourage you to start asking the universally acclaimed but often neglected one word question of “Why?”

Why are we not consistently reaching our targets? What are the trends we need to look at? Where do our sales people need coaching in order to improve?

To uncover this information you need data, as well as systems. However, not just any data or any system. What you need is a system that makes it easy to find the information you need, fast, to turn the data into an action plan for course correction. We may think we are doing the right thing by looking at the bottom line big numbers (quota attainment, accumulated sales) and digging into the finer details (KPI’s). However, if your top and bottom performers have similar activity levels, what can your system tell you that explains the vast performance gap?It’s obviously not just about doing more things faster, particularly when operating in complex sales environments – if this was the case, we’d just up the activity KPI’s and watch sales skyrocket. 

Subsequently, your systems need to provide data that allows you to explore and evaluate behaviors and metrics that look at effectiveness, not just efficiency. 

Let’s assume that you want to understand and take action on how your organization can get better at prospecting (I mean, who doesn’t?) in 2016. Before digging into the finer details, your first step would be to identify your ideal and most profitable customers, so you can direct your prospecting efforts towards this segment.

In order to do this effectively, your system needs to make it easy to identify who these clients are – how do you pinpoint the deal circumstances (whether for new sales or upselling) where you experience higher win rates, lower sales costs and solid deal sizes?

Next, take a closer look at how your best people prospect. Your system should allow you to look at their lead/prospect to opportunity rate and dissect which communication methods they use. Can you uncover what questions they tend to ask, or how many companies they are in contact with on a weekly basis? How many people within the prospect’s organization do they reach out to and what is the cadence, or rhythm of their contact points?

If you are unable to uncover the habits and processes of your top performers and teach your other reps to replicate their approach, how can you expect a better result next year? If we can’t identify where middle performers are falling short, how can we expect them to excel next quarter?

Take action and make best practices easy to follow

Uncovering the reasons behind the numbers is the first step. However, in order to improve the results we need to take action. There are lots of steps you can take, here are just a few suggestions.

• Gather your best practices and design a sales process that is replicable and easy to follow for everyone on the team
• Define your ideal customer profiles, use what you have learned from your top performers and identify what a successful prospecting campaign looks like. Document the instructions so your sales people can execute
• Look at the behaviors that are keeping reps from exceeding quota and set aside time to coach them
• Start measuring effectiveness by looking at leading indicators
• Conduct a win/loss analysis each quarter to better understand which types of customers and deals to pursue and which to stay away from 

If you are looking for a different approach to reach your sales targets, we would love to join you on the journey. Contact us today on sales@membrain.com for a free consultation and take a look at our free resources for more information on the Membrain way.