Tracking & Diagnosing Sales Performance

 
Results vs Activity 

One of my clients was recently wrestling with a common business challenge - a contracted professional salesperson who was not delivering results. She was uncertain about the correctness of insisting on a report of his activities because her initial request had been met with, "I don't have time for that. I'm busy getting out there seeing people. What do you want: Sales or reports?"

Like most "half truths" this one caused her some angst: She did want sales; activities were not what she was paying for - but the arrangement wasn't working, and she could not see why.

The answer is simple once you think it through: As a business manager, you pay people to produce results, and that's exactly where the focus of both parties should be - in this case, on sales. The only time that "activity" becomes relevant is when you are faced with a lack of results, and need to diagnose the source of the problem, with a view to correcting it.

There is little point in tracking a person's activities if their results are in the upper range of what you expect, pay for or believe possible (unless, of course, you want to learn what they are doing right so that you can keep improving, copy or systematise their process).

But, if results are below par, then you need to be tracking activities in order to be able to diagnose the point in the sales process at which things are going off track. Otherwise you are faced with the diagnosis of, "Sales aren't working" which means that the problem is somewhere in the process, but God only knows where, and that correction is going to be haphazard or time consuming or both!

Diagnosing Sales Performance
If sales (results) are below budget, you need the basic numbers on all of their activities in order to be able to identify the source of the problem as, for example:

• Too few prospects (laziness or lack of information on how to do this)
• Too low a conversion of prospects to presentations (look at the presentation process):
• If they don't have a systematic process then it's obvious they have not optimised this and you have found a likely candidate for repair.
• If they have one, ask them to role-play this to you to identify points at which they are failing, then put in specific correction
• Too few proposals/quotations submitted (lack of time/task management systems)
• Too few proposals accepted ie sales. (Check the proposal process, content, delivery, etc).

If you don't have at least these details of activity, you don't have the information you need to identify the points at which to correct an unsatisfactory outcome.

If you have a satisfactory outcome, you don't need to track the activity if it makes another "job" and particularly if it gets in the way of productivity (ie producing MORE results).

It might be an idea, here, to give a moment's thought to any unsatisfactory performance points in your own business, and to think about how you could apply measures of activity to begin the correction process.

How About Your Time?
A similar rule applies to our individual management of our time (those who use our Time Management System will know exactly what I mean here). You don't have to track 100% of your time - unless you are looking for a better experience of your day, in which case tracking it all is just part of the diagnostic step.

Once you have worked out where the time goes - and if you're satisfied with your use of it - then you can relax the process to track just the bits you want.

But, if it stops working, and you start to feel stressed or dissatisfied with your productivity at any time, then go back to tracking it all again, tracing what you do, understanding that, adjusting anything you are unhappy with, and only then go back to tracking only the stuff you want.
 
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