Taking the Right Shots

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While we continue to evolve and integrate our use of big data sources, there are, remarkably, still sales leaders who eschew reliable, repeatable sales productivity metrics.

High-performing teams focus on sales rep productivity and while a single standard measure cannot work across companies, consistent revenue growth comes from a scalable, replicable process that yields results time after time. Once you have that, necessary behaviors, activities and priorities become clearer for our sales professionals.

Why are sales metrics important for sales professionals as much as they are for sales managers?

Clarity.

Clarity = Confidence.

Implementing standard metrics for a sales team, testing and refining them over time, helps sales professionals know where to focus. They know what behaviors get results and that gets sales professionals and sales leaders working confidently from the same playbook.

The modern “remote-virtual-digital”-enabled revenue team has a new urgency for modern technology that equips them to be just as — and perhaps even more — productive than their pre-coronavirus baseline. Tools for measuring standard sales metrics can fall into one of four necessary core capabilities:

  1. Revenue enablement.
  2. Sales engagement.
  3. Conversational intelligence.
  4. Revenue operations

Because we don’t have enough sports analogies in sales, here is one more:

Shot locations in the NBA 2002 v 2020. Research credit to @KickGoldsberry. If you like the NBA, you will enjoy his twitter feed.

Today, players basically only shoot layups or 3-pointers vs. a more distributed shot taking field in 2002.. When the data gurus started digging into the numbers, they revealed that layups and 3-pointers were “worth more” than other shots.

Some sales shots are worth taking, some are not. Using foundational technologies and sales metrics enables us to take the right shots and get better at making them. In the remote-digital-virtul reality, developing high performance teams and meeting repeatable, forecast-able revenue expectations depends on it.