Top five revenue growth KPI’s for selling in a tight economy
With the tighter economy, you might just be taking a closer look at your sales pipeline. A healthy sales pipeline delivers a constant flow of potential business opportunities, and is a direct result of consistent, disciplined sales actions from everyone on your team.
It is much easier to sell in a buoyant economy with high levels of customer enquiry and an abundance of buyer confidence. Drops in sales activity may not show up in your revenue levels.
Scarcity of sales leads is a lagging indicator to sales pipeline health. By the time you realise that sales have slowed, you could be a couple of months behind the changes.
Whatever your business size – if your sales are down, here are five proactive revenue growth key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure that will help you turn sales around.
One – Your CRM Health
A healthy CRM is the hub of your sales. When everyone enters data in a consistent, agreed format, the increased sales visibility and data accuracy will help you forecast for the weeks and months ahead. If you want to drive a healthy CRM and embed some sales discipline, you need to measure activities that deliver this result:
- Number of new contact names entered
- Number of deals tracked
- Number of calls logged
Do you have a commission component in your team’s remuneration? Make a rule that data must be entered in the CRM within 24 hours of the event to count for achieving quotas.
Two – Virtual selling
If your team cannot go out to meet clients, measure activities that keep everyone in front of customers.
That’s right – measure the number of Zoom meetings. If your normal expectation is five client meetings each week, turn this into five Zoom calls per week.
All meeting notes will need to be entered in your CRM, to count towards KPIs. To drive more accountability, stipulate that a task must be allocated for your next follow-up.
Three – Social Selling
Keep close to your customers with social selling. If your team are not connected to every decision-maker and influencer from your clients’ businesses, you can bet the competition will be.
Make a list of your top 20% of clients, who likely deliver 60-80% of your total business revenue.
At each company:
1. List all the critical job titles that you need to interact with, e.g. CEO, CFO, CIO, Head of Sales, Head of Operations, etc
2. Next list the gatekeepers whom you regularly interact with, e.g. PA, HR Manager
3. List everyone who handles your invoices, e.g. Head of Accounts, Procurement Manager
4. List everyone who has the power to say ‘No’
5. List all influencers.
6. Now check that you are connected to everyone on social media.
7. Make sure you have email, DDI and mobile numbers for each person.
Set a team goal for how many people you will connect with each week. Also, aim to post at least three times each week on LinkedIn, Facebook or wherever your customers hang out.
Four – Team Meetings
Giving an honest account to your peers really drives accountability and delivers more results. With your team selling at the most challenging time in living history, consciously develop a positive, supportive sales culture. You need everyone to be real about sales challenges, so that you can help them find solutions.
Make attendance compulsory at your weekly team meetings. Encourage daily comments on your Slack channel. Develop a buddy system for peer support. The ideas generated from all this inter-connection will help create the breakthrough you’re looking for. And you will have fun together. Which will help protect your talent from being poached by the competition.
Five – Training
Change is the only constant in some industries right now. Everyone will need to keep up with the latest developments in sales and in your industry.
If you’re not as busy as you would like to be, your team will likely have some downtime. Why not encourage everyone to do one hour of training per day?
Focus in on the skills your team lacks completely, or where you need to improve your competency levels.
This is also a great way to develop presentation skills, via Zoom or in person. Let everyone take a turn presenting at your weekly sales meeting, sharing their new skills. Your whole team will develop and feel more positive by taking actions in the direction you want to go.
Summary
Remember this is a marathon, not a sprint. Consistent, disciplined sales actions will develop into a snowball effect.
Maintain your revenue by protecting existing clients and put your team on track to establishing sales with new clients. The result? You will be ahead of the competition, and ready for when the economy rises again.
MARY CRAMPTON IS THE OWNER AND PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT AT MAGNIFY CONSULTING.
