Can we get real at this point? If you’re a race car driver, you need to know how fast your car can go and how far you can go on a set of tires. If you’re a farmer, you need to know how many bushels of wheat or beans or whatever an acre of crops are going to produce. Whatever your business, you certainly would measure the results of each effort so you can use that information to predict future results.

Why is it that most business owners don’t measure what’s happening in their sales and marketing efforts?

Really?! Can you really quote any hard data about your marketing and sales processes other than what you spend on ads and marketing, what your payroll is and how much you sell each month?

Sorry but, that is NOT going to cut it!

Think about this in the farmer example… If all you know is how much you spend on seeds and equipment and supplies during the year andthen how much you sell your produce for after the harvest then yes, you can figure out if you made money or not. But, you can’t do anything about it. Next year, you can say “I lost money on that wheat crop last year so, I’m switching to corn this year because the seeds are cheaper.” That’s no guarantee of better results. You need to know how many plants grew on an acre, how much water they got, how many plants died due to disease or bugs, etc. With that information you can adjust next year – plant closer together, bring in a watering system, etc. and get better results. You can also compare this crop with alternatives more clearly.

It just makes sense right? If you’ve got a sales team to manage, then you either measure the process or get used to firing sales people regularly and constantly training new ones that won’t last. The key to hiring and keeping sales people is making them successful. How can you help them if you don’t look under the hood?

After 7 years of working with business owners, sales executives and marketing gurus, I know that it’s just not easy to get the data that matters. Think about it like this… If you’re not doing it now because you can’t figure out how to, then your competition probably isn’t either. What if you figured out how to measure your marketing and sales processes so you can turn them into an Automatic Selling Machine?

Warning – most contact management, CRM and marketing analytics vendors are going to try and sell you more than you need, over complicate the challenge and expand the cost and cause you to fail to get what you really need – some real numbers you can use.

Sure, using a CRM solution, contact management system or marketing analytics solution can make measuring your process very easy but, only if you keep it simple.

That’s our objective here – to highlight the short list of things you need to measure so you can make it happen with or without software.

Really, you can use a piece of paper or a simple excel sheet to do this. My experience helping businesses implement CRM solutions tells me that you’re better off starting very simple and getting some data than spending 6 months trying to find and implement more complex marketing analytics and CRM systems.

The basic components of any marketing and sales funnel are Unqualified Leads, Qualified Leads, Value to your company, Won Sales and Referrals. That’s it. No reason you can’t start keeping that info in a spreadsheet right? In fact, if that’s all you have to have, setting up a contact management system to do it is easy too.

Again, the problem is that you’ll get dazzled by all the other things the various CRM solutions can do for you and things will get complicated fast.

#1 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Total number of leads coming in.

Simple right? Well, it is but, it means you need to know about all of them. All the referrals your sales people get that they never mention to you. All the call-ins that come in but, never get called back by a sales rep, etc.

#2 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Where does each lead comes from?

How did they hear about you? What ad did they respond to? Where did you meet them? Who referred them to you?

Again, simple stuff but, the key is to be sure you get this information for each and every lead you talk to. If you get 100 leads a month and fail to collect this information for 5 of them, it could really throw off any analysis you do.

#3 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
How qualified is each lead?

This one is tougher. The reason is that you have to decide on objective criteria that makes a lead qualified. Do they have a need for what you sell? Do they have the money for it? The answers don’t necessarily need to mean that are absolutely going to buy from you. Just that there is a basic fit between their needs and situation and your company. They’re worth your time. Choose the 4 or 5 questions you have to ask every new lead and start capturing the answers for each and every lead. I know, you won’t be able to get all that information for all of them. That’s OK. If you don’t get it all, they’re not qualified.

#4 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
What’s the value of the sales opportunity?

Best case scenario, what can you sell them in the near term? What is this opportunity worth to your company? Pretty simple.

#5 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
What market segment do they fit in?

In every business, you have a few segments you have developed unique solutions for. It might be business vs. residential or small vs. large. You’ve got to know where they all fit.

#6 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Product you propose to them.

This could be a direct one to one relationship with the segment they fit in but, it’s usually not that simple. Some customers will request certain solutions even though it’s not what you’d recommend for them given the segment they’re in, etc. Again, you’ve got to track this for each lead.

#7 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Won or Lost

Did they buy or not? Simple right? What about if they just say “call me later”? (that’s a No if they don’t buy within a reasonable amount of time BTW)

#8 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Did they give you a referral?

Why do you need to know this? Well, you need to know if they were asked for one thing. Also, this is a great measure of the satisfaction of that client. Let’s face it… You can value customers by how much they spend but, a customer that gives you referrals is much more valuable than one that spends the same and doesn’t give you any referrals.

That’s it. That’s all you really need to know!

With this information you can look at each and every source of leads, every advertising expense and determine its value to you.

Powerful Insight into Marketing Return

You’ll compute the cost of each dollar in sales based on the source of the lead and you’ll be amazed at how different it is from one marketing channel to another. Variances of 100% or more are common.

Really, just start putting each new lead in a spreadsheet with columns for each of the metrics above and keep it up to date.

In fact, if you don’t have a centralized contact management system or CRM solution in place today, creating this spreadsheet is a great way to start looking for a CRM system. You can share the sheet with potential vendors and they’ll be able to see what you need to measure.

Just get started tracking and measuring these things right away. Even if you’re not sure where this is leading, I promise you it will uncover valuable insights that will lead you to more profitable and sustainable growth.

Related posts:

1. 2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG
2. 3 Ways to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
3. 6 Action Steps to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales

How many sales management books have you read? I’m sure each of your sales reps has a couple of sales guru books that they keep on their desk.

Have you invested in sales training for you team?

A lot of time and money have gone into refining the skills of your sales team.

But somehow, you have a feeling in your gut that when they hit the streets and start pressing the flesh, they fall back on instinct more often than not.

In the first 3 installments of our "Double Your Sales in 2009", we’ve covered setting the "qualification bar" high enough that sales time is focused on the highest value customers and knowing the return on your investment in sales time and expense at each step in your process.  Click here to start with "Qualify Early and Often", the first installment.

Following the guidelines laid out in the first three installments of "Double Your Sales in 2009" will result in stronger and deeper relationships with genuinely qualified buyers and produce more time left in the day so you can increase your sales pipeline. The problem is that you can talk about it in sales meetings ’til you’re blue in the face but old habits die hard. You’re not going to get seasoned sales reps to practice and refine new and sometimes counterintuitive techniques with nothing but a suggestion.

You have to hold them accountable. A baseball coach doesn’t just describe how to swing at a curve ball in the locker room. He goes out to the field and watches the swings and provides detailed suggestions on the minutest of mechanics. In sales, its not usually possible to spend a lot of time "in the field" with each rep. You need a way to track what happens in the field and digest that information in order to identify trends, both good and bad.

If you know what my day job is, then I know you’re thinking, "Oh boy, here comes the CRM sales pitch". Well, the truth is you really don’t need to buy a thing to at least begin tracking sales activities and practices so that you can steer your team in a new direction. Whether you have a CRM or Contact Management System or not, the first step is to figure out what needs to be tracked and how you’ll collect the information.

Obviously, you need to have some way to objectively "grade" each prospect. In installment one, "Qualify Early and Often", we discussed the type of questioning of a prospect that goes into this grade. So that’s where you’ll start. Even if its a hard copy "lead sheet" that each sales person fills out for each lead they talk to, or maybe a simple excel spreadsheet, you need to know the prospect’s answers to each qualifying question. The idea is that we need to move away from listening to every sales rep’s "story" about each prospect which usually ends with the rep saying they "feel" good about this one. Having the prospect’s answers to the questions let’s YOU decide if their qualified, even if you never speak to them yourself.

I know, you’re already saying "My sales reps just won’t fill the lead sheets out. I don’t even want to hear all the complaining I’ll get." Be patient, we’ve got the secret sauce to over come the push back coming up dead ahead.

First though, let’s refine our lead sheet idea a bit. All we really need to do is add the sales actions or steps that have been takin with every lead. No need to get overly detailed here. The priority is to track the sales actions that cost you and your sales team large amounts of time and money.

Here’s an example I mocked up in excel in 10 minutes. This doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive. Simple is good!

Now all you have to do is work out some guidelines for which of the sales actions you’re willing to invest your time and money in depending on the answers to the qualification questions. This isn’t going to take too much time for your sales team and you’ll easily see the trends. When the lead sheet shows you that the customer is doing business with your lowest priced competitor and is currently spending only $5,000 per year but, your sales rep has made the two hour drive to their office twice (once for the 1st meeting, then again for the presentation) and invested two hours in preparing a proposal, you know something needs to change. Of course, these guidelines are going to be unique to your business and market. Remember that this is a process of refinement that is on-going. You don’t have to have all the anwers up front. In fact, once you start collecting the information, the most important guidelines will present themselves.

OK, now for the shameless plug – Clearly, an investment in a contact management system can make this easier for the user and add value to the effort. If you’re collecting information like this, it just makes good sense to have it in database that allows you to search against those qualification fields. Just imagine what you could do with a list of all leads you’ve encountered that are working with a certain competitor and spending a large amount of money. You may even be able to leverage email marketing capabilities to "drip market" to the smaller ones instead of investing all your sales resources on them. The point here is to start tracking the information somehow. If paper makes the most sense in your organization, that’s fine. Just get started!

And that’s where most businesses fail in sales management. They just won’t take that first step. And of course, its usually largely due to the push back you get from your sales team. They tell you they feel like you’re micro-managing them. They tell you its too time consuming and keeps them from selling. Then they wait until 15 minutes before the sales meeting and just fly through a weeks worth of lead sheets and basically make it up.

Clearly, you have to sell the concept to your sales team. Read through all 5 installments of Double Your Sales in 2009 and you’re bound to find 4 or 5 direct benefits to the sales team that fit your world. Of course, its a great idea to let the sales team be part of creating the lead sheet in the first place. My favorite suggestion is to get the superstars of your sales team to put it together. This way the rest of the team sees cooperation as a way to learn from the masters!

The most crucial ingredient in your sales pitch to your sales team is resolve. No matter how well you’ve sold it to them, you have to be willing to say its an absolute job requirement. No ifs, ands or buts….

Then you have to follow through and collect, digest and provide feedback on the information regularly. Believe it or not, what I have found to be the most effective way to jump start this process with your sales team is to simply start collating the information and sharing a comparison of all reps with the entire team. You can start that immediately. You don’t have to have all the answers. You don’t have to have worked out all the guidelines for when to do a presentation or proposal. As discussed above, sometimes you need to see a bit of data to answer those questions.

So just start putting the #s on the whiteboard during the sales meeting or email them out once a week. Example: For each rep, show the number of leads identified as decision makers with a current budget of $10,000 or more. Again, you questions and the important points to track will be unique to you but, sales people are competitive. As soon as they see themselves being compared to others based on this information, they’ll start collecting it and getting it to you. You may hear some grumbling about certain circumstances creating an unfair comparison but, that’s the beauty of starting out simple like this early in the process. You’re not saying that this information is going to effect their compensation, quota or territory. You’re just looking for trends.

And then after a month or so, you’re seeing trends and the sales team is starting to talk about the guidelines themselves. Information is powerful. Your sales team has been driving around without a dashboard in their car. Their not usually analytical folks. This information will show them how full the tank is, what the oil pressure is and how fast they should go. This is the feedback they need to begin to self adjust. With some guidance from you, in a few short weeks they’ll all be focusing in on the same concepts and practices. Your heard of cats just became a heard of mustangs charging out in front of the competition!

Up next in our "Double Your Sales in 2009" series, our fifth and final installment – "How to super charge your sales engine without increasing expenses".  This is the big pay off. Think of it like this, the first 4 installments were increasing the capacity of your sales engine. Next, we’re going to add a turbo charger and find out where to get the jet fuel! It’ll be available here on February 23.  Don’t forget to register to receive the entire "Double Your Sales in 2009" series as an e-Book here.

Related posts:

1. The Law of Attraction – Part 3 of Double Your Sales in 2009
2. Qualify Early and Often – Part 1 of 5 from “Double Your Sales in 2009″
3. Time is Everything – Double Your Sales in 2009 Part 2

I had an experience like that today.  This customer, we’ll call her Nicky, just joined her company as Director of Sales.  Prior to her arrival, there has been NO sales tracking, contact management, CRM or marketing to speak of.

Nicky’s fought these fights before and she’s got big plans for her new organization.  I love working with people like Nicky!

She knows the value of basic contact management, sales activity tracking and pipeline management.  She also knows that putting some straight forward and management direct marketing in place will help her nurture clients as there is a lot of repeat business in her world.

Its not uncommon that SalesNexus customer have these requirements.  What’s uncommon about Nicky is that she’s not overwhelmed by all the choices, decisions and minutia associated with achieving all of these goals AND she’s not crazy enough to try and do it all at once.

The conversation I had with Nicky was really just blind luck on my part.  Nicky’s business has seasonal patterns and the big sales push of the year is going on right now.  She’s smart enough not to let implementing technology take her eye off that ball.

But right now she’s using an excel sheet to manage the sales pipeline.  Remember, there is no contact management or CRM at all.

Normally, new SalesNexus clients want to get it all in place ASAP.  That means we discuss the type of contact management system they are using now or at least what data they’ll want imported into a new database, then we immediately dive into adding custom fields to tailor the contact management database to the client’s unique needs.  Then we start creating reports that summarize the key metrics in their business and finally build marketing campaigns.

Believe me, an implementation project like this can be a real bear to manage with all of the decisions associated to be made by the client who is still not conversant with the technology.

So Nicky says “Listen Craig, I need a basic contact management database to facilitate data sharing during our sales push.  During that time I’ll start experimenting with tracking sales pipeline in the contact management system.  When October rolls around, I’ll know the system pretty well and THEN I’ll have the time and knowledge I need to decide how to the contact management system should be customized for my business.  Then we can create some reports to track sales activity and the pipeline and then finally, start building marketing campaigns.”

So I say “Wow!  Thank you.  You just made my life a lot easier.  I’m going to love working with you!”

So there is it folks, the road map to successful implementation of a new Contact Management, CRM or Sales and Marketing Automation system:

1. Import your basic contact data into the contact management system and encourage logging of notes and activities.
2. Lets some time pass.  Experiment with queries, reports, etc.  Get to know the system.
3. Then huddle everyone up and decide what specific fields you want to add to the database that are uniquely relevant to your business.
4. Build a report that ties sales activity to sales pipeline – the idea here is that if a sales rep is showing a sales opp at 90% for this month for a huge dollar amount but, he hasn’t completed the key fields in the contact management system and has only had one call or meeting with the customer, you know some thing’s fishy.
5. Then start building marketing campaigns that target the niches you can carve out of the contact management database using the unique fields you’ve added.

I know it seems obvious.  Problem is most customers want it all ASAP so they can realize the ROI that they’re hoping for from their investment in contact management.

I’m going to work on helping customers find the right pace.  Thanks again Nicky!

Related posts:

1. “Contact Management Ain’t Easy, Its Essential”
2. Making Contact Management Work Webinar
3. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it!