Pictures are worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to measuring sales and marketing production.

Measuring Sales Production Correctly

Figure 1 below contains two process behavior charts showing production measurements from a B2B company’s sales process. The first shows the quantity of qualified opportunities generated per month. The second shows quantity of closed orders per month. Each is for the same group of salespeople over the same twelve month time period.

Most companies measure orders (output) only, so they have no way of knowing what is really going on in the business. In this case we can tell a lot more about what is going on because we have a measure of the input (qualified opportunities) as well as the output.

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May 27th, 2009 Posted to Blog | Comments (6)

I’m on my way back to Canada to work with a client for the week. I’m spending a lot of time away from home this month, which makes me unpopular at home. Besides, it gets darn cold in Canada.

However, as always when implementing a new sales process, things are very interesting … from many points of view. Here are two to consider:

The measurement perspective of the process (the subject of this week’s article) is critical. This is where you stitch together the means of gathering the data such as Google clicks, landing page opt-ins, qualifying phone calls, and opportunity qualification criteria. You have to have a framework for it all to fit together and a means of validating it, all the way down to some countable aspect of reality. Then, after you set it up, you watch as the spreadsheets get filled in day by day and use simple charts and pictures to analyze what is going on. (more…)

November 7th, 2007 Posted to Blog | Comments (2)