Measuring the performance of each salesperson has a purpose: to help them be more profitable to your company.When this happens, they earn more, receive better incentives, and feel valued –all of which is good for your business. Keith Fenner, strategic sales managerat Softline ACCPAC, offers some tips on tracking sales success.
How do you go about setting up systems to monitor sales performance?
First, you must thoroughly understand the process of how you intend to sell your product. Casting that process in stoneis fundamental to success. Often, sales performance information is too little, too late. Because of the volume of data generated by sales activities, managers end up spending a huge amount of time wading through reports while unidentified problems areas worsen.
A sales dashboard, used against your database, will show the sales team’s performance to date, ensuring that you do not need to go looking for important sales information. This type of system allows salespeople to see their own closed sales, while a sales manager can view individual and team performance on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis, allowing for measurement against target.
I’m not talking about a horribly expensive piece of software. Good customer relationship management systems are really cost-effective. For the small to medium business, where time and resources are limited, these systems are vital in enabling people to manage their lives.Implementing a CRM system can double your sales in an instant, not because it’sa silver bullet, but because it introduces processes into your organisation.
How important is it to record call rates?
You have to know how many calls your people are making, but the true measure of success is how many meetings result from those calls. It’s not about volume, but conversion. And I don’t just mean into actual sales. What is important is the contact, and the opportunity to distribute information about a product. Sales can always be closed at a laterstage.
How do you define and measure after-sales service?
In the process of completing a sale you pay a great amount of attention to the customer; once the sale is closed, you can’t just disappear. You should be moving the customer onto the next level, which is customer care. Every after-sales interaction must be turned into a positive one. Resolving a customer complaint can actually leave a customer with a greatly enhanced view of your business.
How effective are “rate our service” surveys?
Again, the important point to remember is process. After I took my car in for a service recently, I received a call to ask if I was happy with the service I had received. The caller knew nothing about the problems with my car or about the follow-up the garage had promised. What is the point of that kind of call? It’s meaningless. If you going to implement a “rate our service” system make sure it’s fully integrated from front office to back end.
For more information, contact Keith Fennerat Softline ACCPAC on +27 11 803 7327