If your company depends on revenue from sales of products, it stands to reason that KPIs matter. It is only logical to have quotas to fulfill in terms of sales, after all. Off the top of your head, try to list out the KPIs for sales that you would define for your reps. Most owners and managers would respond with the income each representative brings into your firm. This is obviously one of the metrics you have to measure, but it isn’t the only one. Oh no, in order to optimize your sales processes, you have to define KPIs for a number of other processes too. By sticking to just one KPI, you’re almost certainly dooming your company to failure. Here are some other KPI trackers your teams must measure in the sales department.
A large part of selling a product is getting calls through to potential customers in your target market. This is one of the best ways to communicate directly with the customer. No one likes a phone salesperson, but the tactic does work to a certain extent. If you use phone marketing in your company’s sales department, you need to measure how many of your sales reps’ calls turn into paying customers. For door-to-door marketing, the same procedure needs to be used. It’s important to consider how many customers your reps contacts in a day or week and how many of these were “converted”. If the number gets low, consider looking for upgrades to the existing system of marketing your products.
Many sales opportunities are lost because sales reps give up when their first call doesn’t turn into an actual sale. The thing is, most actual sales happen after the second or even the third call. This can be either a house call or a phone call, of course. If your reps come away with a “maybe” and don’t follow up often enough, they are actually jeopardizing your entire profit margin. By measuring how many follow-ups your sales force makes per rep, you’re ensuring that nobody gives up when they shouldn’t.
Sales are becoming far easier to make, through the use of social media. Social networking is the way into the future. Surprisingly, KPI dashboards can also measure sales that are a direct result of how often a rep posts content relevant to the company on social media networks. If a sales rep gains the interest of followers, this can translate directly to sales as well. Encourage your sales teams to have an active social media presence, and to maintain this presence for the foreseeable future. If you notice a correlation between this and your sales revenue, you may be onto something.
This is probably the easiest to track and the easiest to adjust. This isn’t the revenue per individual employee, but the overall sales revenue for the department for that month. Ideally, you shouldn’t allow this value to drop too far below that of the previous month, especially without reason. There are usually boundaries within which this number can fluctuate. In an effort to make your employees more likely to work harder and sell more products, try introducing incentives for making quotas and goals each month.
The monthly sales target, social media activity, conversion rates and follow-up rates are a few of the KPIs for sales that you can track. Some of these can be pretty difficult to identify and measure quantitatively, but when you do the resulting information can propel your company towards greater heights.