THE SECRET SALES METRIC MOST CORRELATED WITH CLOSING NEW BUSINESS
As a sales leader, you’ve done everything you’re supposed to:
- You know that successful sales teams use a CRM, so you got one
- You know that training is essential to motivating and empowering your team, so you’ve been sending them videos of conferences with tips and tricks.
- You know that you need to coach your salespeople based on the data, so you’ve started collecting it en masse.
You know these are things successful sales teams use. You may have even used them in the past to great success, but now they’re not working. And you’re left wondering what more you need to lead a successful sales team
Here are the problems with the actions above:
- A CRM gives you the illusion of a sales process, but it is not a sales process.
- Your CRM measures activity not movement. Progress suggests forward movement.
- Your CRM motivates them to activity but does little to elevate positive results.
- Without a standard system across your sales team in place, your salespeople are reinventing their sales strategy with every new prospect.
- The metrics that you record don’t impact sales and the amount of data is so excessive that you can’t make sense of it.
If you’re scratching your head right now, you’re not alone. Sales leaders everywhere are giving their teams these resources, imitating others who are making these resources work, without ever discovering the true reason behind successful sales leadership.
Once that sales process is in place, you will have the capability to train, coach, and record data in a way that drives sales rather than impedes them.
If your sales team is like most, then they won’t tell you that they are at a loss of where to go or what to do. Are you ready to give them all of the tools to start closing new business? You’ll do this by learning how to leverage a rock-solid sales process and the #1 metric most closely correlated with closing new business.
Applying these insights will lead to greater skill and productivity among your salespeople, an accurate assessment of the health of your sales pipeline, and a method of recording data and metrics that actually impact the amount you sell.
Walking Into A Dark Alley Blindfolded
Most sales leaders think they have a process, but it is actually only the illusion of a process.
For example, you may think that you have a sales process based on the information you collect with your CRM. The CRM is showing you 5,000 cases. The pipeline must be full if that many cases have been entered, right?
This illusion is easily shattered by a simple but powerful test. Answer the following questions. Go slow. Be Deliberate. Write your answers.
Pipeline Illusion Test
1. What is the total number of cases currently in your pipeline?
2. Of those cases, how many have a scheduled time for the next meeting?
3. Of the cases currently on your schedule, how many of them have
- The time, date, and location certain? (“I’ll call you next Tuesday,” does not qualify)
- The purpose of the next meeting mutually understood?
How many of your pipeline’s cases meet the third criteria in the test above? How does that compare with the total number of cases? If the answer to question number one and question number three are not the same—you have a sales process problem!
The sales process being used by most salespeople is like walking into a dark alley wearing a blindfold. It does little to illuminate the path and guide the steps. Therefore, salespeople lack the confidence to be successful. Lack of confidence is contagious. Prospects catch it from salespeople.
CRMs are useful tools, but they can’t replace the framework that holds the rest of your sales system together. Data alone is not enough. You need a method to contextualize it and your team needs a strategy and the confidence to take that data and turn it into revenue generating actions.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What do your salespeople have that guides them through the sales cycle with new prospects?
- What resources, other than the marketing funnel or fulfilling their KPIs, do your salespeople have to orient them toward getting new closes?
- Does your sales team have a standard, disciplined plan for how sales cases should progress across the board?
If your answers to these questions are uncertain, or if your answers are focused on features like CRM, you have no sales process.
A strong sales process is the skeleton that supports your team’s data, tips, tricks, plays, actions, and coaching.
If you have just discovered that your sales team is lacking the process it needs to be successful, Griffin Hill can help. We have a process that has been tested over 30 years and proven through thousands of cases. Over 3,500 salespeople, 144,000 sales cases, and 467,000 sales interactions inform the research-based sales process that we and our clients use to support a rigorous, engaging, powerful sales system that leads both salespeople and prospects to successful interactions.
With a Griffin Hill Insider membership, you’ll gain access to portions of the Sales Process Mastery course, which will teach you in-depth how to apply a powerful, easy-to-follow process with your team. The result will be more discipline on your team in the way you progress cases, research-based training for your salespeople, and coaching that will increase the targeted effectiveness of your data-collecting efforts.
If All You Have Is A Hammer, Everything Looks Like A Nail
Most of your salespeople are reinventing the sales process with every new prospect. This means that with every new prospect, your sales team is coming up with the following on the fly
- The purpose of the meeting.
- Plays they’ll use to persuade prospects.
- How to direct the conversation to the most effective dialogue.
- How to schedule a time, date, and location with minimal falloff risk.
The result is inoperable levels of disorganization for your sales team. Because everyone on the team has been trained differently, everyone is saying and doing different things to progress prospects that should be at the same stage in the pipeline. This further erodes your ability to know:
In order for your salespeople to be successful, they need a process that organizes their knowledge of tips and tricks into a systematic, predictable plan of action.
In Griffin Hill’s sales system, our Sales Process Mastery course accomplishes this by providing a common language that serves as a universal translator for your whole team’s collected sales knowledge. This will allow you to take the best practices from individuals across your whole sales team and apply them to a process that will be performed by every salesperson.
Griffin Hill’s online course, Sales Process Mastery, is the solution to the impossibility sales leaders are discovering when they try to train all of their seasoned salespeople in one new, unified approach. It doesn’t replace the valuable knowledge and experiences your sales people possess. Instead, it explains where their skills, tips, and tricks will be most impactful in the process and sets a standard for how to implement them
The Sales Process Mastery online course adapts our Griffin Hill sales process to your organization by giving your team organized, disciplined training that elevates their skills. Get your Insider membership for access to Sales Process Mastery and hours of free targeted training for your team.
Data, Data, Everywhere, But Not A Drop To Drink
John Naisbitt famously declared, “We’re drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”
You’ve got more data and information than you’ve ever had, and yet, your current use of CRM can’t account for the single most important metric to drive closes.
What sales leaders traditionally measure through their CRM:
- Number of calls made and doors knocked
- Amount of meetings held.
- How many cases are currently in the pipeline.
- How many closes have been made
This data isn’t impacting sales results. KPIs based on these numbers are incapable of increasing sales performance among your salespeople. This comes down to an organizational failure, not an individual one.
Here is your next test of process efficacy. Ask yourself:
“How many times did I, or my team, move a sales case to the next step as evidenced by a firm appointment (time, date, place certain) with a clear objective (purpose mutually understood)?”
Take a guess at that number.
Did you use some mental gymnastics to derive it based on a number in your CRM?
If you don’t immediately know the answer to that question, you don’t have a sales process
You are measuring activity, not movement. If you can’t measure movement, it’s not a process. When you don’t have a process, you are incapable of measuring the frequency that you’re advancing prospects. Without that information, all of the other data points mean nothing.
Here’s a case from Dr. Scott O. Baird that demonstrates this:
John Naisbitt famously declared, “We’re drowning in information but starved for knowledge.”
You’ve got more data and information than you’ve ever had, and yet, your current use of CRM can’t account for the single most important metric to drive closes.
What sales leaders traditionally measure through their CRM:
- Number of calls made and doors knocked
- Amount of meetings held.
- How many cases are currently in the pipeline.
- How many closes have been made
This data isn’t impacting sales results. KPIs based on these numbers are incapable of increasing sales performance among your salespeople. This comes down to an organizational failure, not an individual one.
I was working with a large multinational company to help them with their sales process and results. A salesman, who this company liked a lot, had the right attitude and work ethic but was struggling to produce sales results. The one KPI that this multinational held their salespeople to was that they had to be in 25 sales meetings every month.
This salesman had faithfully hit that KPI every month for 2 years.
He had closed exactly 0 deals.
The company loved his attitude, his work ethic, and his enthusiasm, but despite those excellent attributes, he had never closed a deal.
I went with this salesman to discover a solution to the problem. I scheduled the day, met this salesman at 7:00 am, and asked, “What are we going to do today?
This salesman responded with his plan to meet with two, very large, multinational companies.
“Great! I love it!” I said, “What’s our purpose when we meet with the first company?”
The salesman looked at me dumbfounded. He didn’t even understand the question.
When I asked, “What are we trying to accomplish?” the salesman answered, “Well, facetime.”
I went with this salesman to these two companies, and on our way, we bought gallons of coffee and dozens of donuts. We showed up at the first firm, the secretary warmly greeted us, and then immediately ushered us into a small conference room. Over the course of the next hour, people came in, drank coffee, ate donuts, and chatted. At the end of the hour, the salesman and I packed up their coffee and donuts and left.
This salesman had been in 25 sales meetings, just like this one, every month for two years (approximately 14,400 donuts).
Is it any surprise that this salesman didn’t close any business?
When you consider this salesman, he was actually very successful at what his sales manager was asking him to do.
They weren’t asking him to follow a sales process.
They weren’t asking him to advance prospects through their pipeline.
They were asking him to hit 25 sales meetings every month, and he was excellent at reaching that goal.
The problem wasn’t poor work ethic, bad attitude, or low enthusiasm. It was a lack of process that resulted in years of wasted time, coffee, and donuts.
Earlier we said that the sales process for most salespeople is like walking into a dark alley blindfolded. When you fail to give your sales teams a process, and when you fail to teach them that the frequency of advancing process is the #1 metric correlated with closing sales, you leave them in this situation—ill-equipped, at a disadvantage, and without confidence.
When this salesman was introduced to the Griffin Hill, he was able to improve his sales process by implementing it across the entire company.
This salesman became the best salesperson at the company once he had a process to guide him and his prospects through the sales cycle, and once he embraced the frequency of advancing process as his #1 KPI.
So how do we measure the frequency of advancing process?
Griffin Hill’s ScoreCard measures the frequency of advancing the process through a system based around Points. Points allows you to track the frequency at which your salespeople are moving the case forward. It encourages them to memorialize progress by scheduling events with their prospects where the time, date, and location are certain and the purpose is mutually understood
If the prospect is unwilling to schedule a next event, they are either uninterested or unable to purchase. They are not qualified and they do not belong in the sales pipeline. Just that much information re-shapes the training and development of a salesperson. Sales people must be able to get people qualified! If you want to close more business, develop the skills of igniting interest and finding a budget. Having a strong process provides a sales-impacting metric. Having a sales-impacting metric shapes training, development, and coaching.
When your sales process gives you a real pipeline view, you can accurately forecast the performance of your sales team. When your process accurately accounts for each step, it gives you a tool to discover where people are falling off of your pipeline. In response, you can correct that step in your training and development. As a result, you will continue to achieve higher sales results.
Griffin Hill offers ScoreCard in our three paid membership levels, but to access them you need to be an Insider first. Improving sales performance can be as simple as measuring these two metrics instead of all the other data.