3 fundamental sales KPIs that can be automated – Part 2
Find holes in your funnel
With the input of your sales engine measured, you can then identify what comes out of the engine. In the case of a car engine, it converts gas and air into motion but some waste comes out of the process which usually takes the form of heat and sound. Visualize yourself in a car on the highway, the car starts to make a lot of noise, smoke comes out from under the hood. When you get to the shop, your mechanic might ask what kind of sound it made before it broke down, or what color was the smoke.
All great sales engines have constant monitoring of the byproduct of the sales process. Just as your mechanic asks what kind of sound it made, you need to ask “where did those lost opps come from”.
Assuming that Salesforce is setup with standard reminders, the right list views, and managers are coaching users through their open pipeline on a regular basis, it will be easy to measure your outputs:
- Closed Opportunities (compared to #1 New Opportunities): Is management pushing deals through the process?
- Closed Lost Reasons by Month: Are we within a budget cycle slowdown (selling to higher ed during admission season) or is an expected slowdown due to vacation season (summer) coming up?
- Closed Lost vs Closed Won Opportunities: Do NOT prominently display this number up front because non-sales people oversimplify the sales process and extrapolate ideas from it that simply are not true. For instance, you will often find that the best sales rep in your company has the lowest close ratio because they are calling the most people.
Helpful AppExchange apps that can help with this:
Report sender to send lost deals list with full details to the sales team ahead of your weekly sales status call. This will allow for a fast offline snapshot review of what is killing deals.