Is your sales team efficient? Do they perform effectively?
If the answer is “no” or, even worse, “I don’t know”, it may be time to invest in a sales enablement strategy. Sales enablement is defined simply as a strategic series of processes, people and technology used to improve a sales team’s productivity and bring in more revenue for the company.
This removes the barrier between sales and marketing, allowing each department to collaborate and make better-informed business decisions for the company. Essentially, it improves the entire content process by utilizing an intentional strategy that aligns the interest of both parties, searching for ways to improve your overall success rate.
To do this effectively, you need to know exactly what you’re looking for, using sales KPIs. A key performance indicator (KPI) is a way to measurable value that demonstrates how effectively you’re accomplishing your key business objectives.
Measuring sales KPIs is only half the battle. First, you need to know exactly what you are looking for and what it does for your company. Once you have this information, you can use it to great benefit with your teams to improve overall productivity.
Here are 6 sales KPIs you should measure and how they affect your company:
Voice of the Customer
Voice of the customer refers to the data that you receive from your customer’s feedback. This data is so important to improve customer service initiatives, enhance product offerings and update strategies to suit customers needs. Your customers are driving the buying process, so knowing what they need is imperative.
How to measure: Measure touch points with the customers. Surveys, focus groups, interviews, and feedback forms are great ways to conduct research. Voice of the customer can affect any outward-facing interactions with all customers, so knowing what they need and how to embrace that need is important.
Content Creation Time
Creating content is a great way to connect with your audience. It’s a valuable tool for your sales to wield in customer relations, as well as a great resource for any current or prospective clients. However, creating content takes a great deal of time, energy and resources. Many companies have cut down on the time used for creating content by having sales reps create their own personalized content, such as videos or slide decks, for the prospects they are trying to reach. Personalization is a great way to utilize content, allowing sales representatives to provide a personal link from the business to the prospect.
How to measure: Measure the time used to create content. Make sure that everything is operating efficiently. Look to cut the time and resources used for creating content by enlisting sales reps to create personalized content such as video. Giving a sales leader the material and the freedom to create something of their own is a powerful way to break down the barrier between sales and marketing.
Customer Churn Rates
Churn rates refer to the number of customers that you lose over a period of time. Churn can point to a number of things, all of which are fixable! Unsatisfied customers, the quality of your product, the price of your product, or even poor marketing can lead to churn.
How to measure: Measure the time it takes to train your employees and the cost of new customer acquisitions. Knowing these numbers which will help you strategize and formulate a better renewal plan and change your sales patterns to be more customer-centric. A customer-centric sale will go a long way for keeping that customer for the long haul.
Training
Training is, for some obvious and some not-so-obvious reasons, very important to the success of your business. Yes, you need your new employees to have the knowledge they need to succeed in their jobs. But you also need to provide training for old employees. Products and plans change, and if the change affects the jobs of the sales teams, they need to know what’s going on. Providing training keeps everyone up-to-date on how the business operates while providing career direction and development.
How to measure: Performance reviews are a great way to assess if your training is effective, and where your sales team is, as opposed to where they should be. Once you’ve done the performance review, start a series of product certifications that allow your team to become experts on your product. Celebrate the high scorers, which gives a little incentive to everyone else.
Content Accessibility
Creating content is an excellent strategy that provides customers with information that they need, and it’s hugely effective. But if your content is inaccessible to those that are trying to use it, you’re not doing yourself any favors. You need to be sure that your prospects and your sales team can access the content. Making sure that your team is prepared and able to access and share your content is paramount to your company’s success.
How to measure: Fortunately, measuring content accessibility is fairly easy. The best way to track accessibility is having your sales team accessing, personalizing and developing their own content. You should be able to track clicks and downloads for blogs or e-books, and keep tabs on website traffic. A sales enablement platform allows you to see if prospects are interacting with content sent out by your sales or marketing teams.
Conversion rates
Finally, it’s important to look at conversion rates. Conversions rates simply look at the lead-to-customer conversion relationship. Knowing how long it takes to turn leads into customers is helpful to know how effective your sales team and marketing efforts are.
How to measure: Do a little math. Take the total number of closed deals over a period of time and divide by the total number of leads generated in that same period of time. Multiply that number by 100 to get a percentage, and that should give you a pretty good idea of your conversion rate. Alternatively, you can track a customer through their entire journey. This would give you a deep look at what steps work, which steps you need to get rid of, and how long the process typically takes.
Need more help with measuring sales KPIs? vidREACH is here to help.
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