If you are a trainer or a sales manager you must have spent plenty of time and effort trying to quantify and measure your sales rep’s skills.
You must have also in the process come up with useful training methodologies and tests, most of which your sales teams have failed or performed poorly during the sales training programs, but nevertheless closed their sales in flying colors that enhanced your company’s business growth .
However, from our experience as a vendor of small business sales CRM software platform, we found that there are no other better indicators for sales growth than viewing sales pipeline metrics for evaluating a sales person’s skills.
To be more specific and precise, we would like to highlight just four sales pipeline indicators for your business growth, which can be easily found from your CRM database, such as:
- Pipeline Velocity
- Size of the deals
- Number of deals accomplished over a period of time
- Number of conversions done over a period of time
Now if you are someone who has just purchased an easy to use CRM platform like ConvergeHub and is getting started with sales pipeline management, before reading these four metrics that can help to measure sales skills check the “Sales Cycle” in your business, which is according to Trackmaven:
“The sales cycle is the process that companies undergo when selling a product to a customer. It encompasses all activities associated with the closing sale. Many companies have different steps and activities in their sales cycle, depending on how they define it.
Finding a clear cut definition of a sales cycle that spans across the sales industry is tricky. This is because many variations of the definition exist. Some people define it as the time it takes from starting from nothing to closing a deal. Others define it as the time it takes to bring a qualified prospect to close.
Regardless of the definition, however, businesses should keep track of the length of their sales cycle to ensure that their selling process is efficient.”
Why is the sales cycle important for business growth?
Keeping track of the sales cycle provides businesses deeper insights into the efficiency of the operations in sales. Tracking, analyzing and comparing the length of the sales cycle to the standard length across your industry provides information on business growth. For an example, if an organizations sales cycle is shorter than the average length of its industry, it can mean that the organization’s sales department is more efficient than its competitor, whereas a longer sales cycle indicate higher chances of sales falling through the crack.
Here is how the above mentioned four metrics help to measure your businesses’ sales skills:
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Measure how fast deals go through the pipeline
You can measure the average age of deals at each stage of the sales pipeline or the average across the whole length of sales cycles, or alternatively measure the average length of time it takes to close a deal.
Now, let us compare two hypothetical sales people and see why measuring sales cycle plays a big role for your business growth. If Tom closes a deal in 6 weeks on an average and Tim does it in 3 weeks, there must be a substantial difference in their work methods and skills.
Since, based on the these numbers we can easily assume that Tom does not have the tendency of gaining small-sized agreements (or mini-closes) during the process of sales, while Tim’s pipeline velocity is a good indicator to show that he uses confirmations like:
“So if I am understanding correctly, are you willing to consider our offering if it helps you save more than $2000?”
Furthermore, Tim probably takes matters into his own hand during the sales process, and continuously checks at a regular interval if another decision has been made by the potential customer.
It is no brainer that pipeline velocity increases with time.
That means sales pipeline velocity must remain higher with experienced sales reps in your organization since it is a sign of danger if that is not.
You can be even more specific in measuring your rep’s sales pipeline velocity using information stored in your CRM database, by starting to measure deal age by each sales stage that you have made in your easy to use CRM software for continuously monitoring predictable revenue for your business growth.
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Measure the average size of a sale
Much like deal velocity in the sales pipeline, the average size of deals is another aspect that should increase with time, (assuming that the business you are into does not have any constraint for deal size).
The average size of deals that can be monitored from information stored in the CRM database of your easy to use CRM software is an excellent indicator of the negotiation skills and confidence of your sales teams.
Average deal size shows whether your saleMeasure the number of leads or deals in the sales pipelines reps do have the courage to go after the ‘Big Fish’ and whether they can identify the requirements of the prospective customers during their meetings and calls.
In other words, the average size of the deals indicates how well are your sale rep’s in choosing the right prospects for your organization’s business growth, or how good are your salespersons at finding out the real requirements of the prospects and thereafter skilled enough to match them to the premium products and services offered by your company.
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Measure the number of leads or deals in the sales pipeline
It is extremely important that you must measure how many leads or deals someone can add within a specific period of time and what is the total number of deals in the sales pipeline in your CRM database.
Now, if the numbers of new leads/deals are scarce, it is a good enough indicator to show that either your sales reps are not very good at initiating their first contacts or they are simply not working hard enough towards generating new leads.
Therefore, that number of deals added within a specific period of time shows sales skills as well as the work ethics maintained by your sales teams, which is one of the best indicators of success in sales and business growth that can be easily measured using a best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub the award-winning CRM for small and medium businesses.
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Measure total win conversion, and conversion by stage
Most owners and sales managers measure the win ratio of their sales reps, since it is a piece of very pertinent information if you look at it by sales stages.
For an example, if Tim has a 75% conversion ratio from “First Meetings Done” to the “Proposal Made” stage in the easy to use CRM software platform, and if it is just 25% for Tom, this can mean one of two things.
It is either Tim is way ahead better at turning a prospective customer’s needs into identifiable “Pain” or that Tim tends to waste time more on nurturing hopeless leads and prospects in his sales pipeline.
Therefore, always compare this sale metric in the CRM database relative to other members in your sales teams.
Conclusion
Hence, all said and done, if you know these 4 sales pipeline metrics (pipeline velocity, size of the deals, number of the deals and conversion ratio) for each team members in your sales at each stage of the sales pipeline in the CRM database, you will have a pretty good idea of each person’s sales skills in your sale team and you can easily compare them with each other for generating more sales and find rapid business growth.
Remember, you do not always need to track every metrics found in your easy to use CRM software at all times since it is definitely wiser to pick only the metrics in your CRM database that matter the most for your business and focus on them for fast-paced business growth.
Although, in conclusion, I would once more reiterate that sales pipeline metrics are the most to-the-point indicators found in an easy to use CRM software like ConvergeHub and other Salesforce Alternative CRM software solutions for highlighting the sales skills of your employees, nevertheless if you have found even better ones, please do add your ideas in the comment below.
