Root Cause Analysis
There are many numbers, or metrics, that need to be monitored in order to optimize the results of your selling efforts. Most sales professionals spend much of their time trying to generate leads or, in other words, they’re trying to fill their sales funnel. Obviously, that’s important. But what would happen to your top and bottom lines if you were able to…
Increase the margin per deal by just 10%?
Shorten your sales cycle by as little as 10%?
Generate 10% more revenue from existing accounts?
Get 10% more qualified leads from marketing?
Spend 10 more minutes per day engaged in revenue-producing activities?
All of the questions above are intended to point out that any one of those action items will produce an uptick in your top and bottom line. If you are able to do more than one, then there’s a compounding effect on your top and bottom line. By impacting two or three – perhaps, four – of those action items or levers, I’ve seen sales organizations increase their revenue by as much as 40% or 45%! And, they do that without hiring one more salesperson.
The traditional focus has been on sales skills training and on filling the funnel and, while that’s still important, we need to take a look at other action items or “levers”. Webster’s dictionary defines a lever as an item that increases the energy or force applied at one end versus another, based on the location of the fulcrum. Imagine the impact that that leverage or compounding leverage will have on your organization.
The problem is these process-related levers are rarely measured. For instance, I will wager that very few, if any, of you have an accurate handle on the length of your current sales cycle. When I ask a sales professional how long their sales cycles are, I get responses that almost inevitably start with the word “about”. Precision is needed in your sales process to produce profitable results, and any answer that starts with “about” is anything but precise.
In order to manage the sales process precisely, we must measure and analyze the metrics (i.e., the numbers) produced by our sales efforts. I identify the most vital sales metrics in my on-demand webinar, Introducing the New Math of Sales Excellence. When you do the math, you’ll see that increasing each of these metrics just by as little as ten percent will produce a huge improvement in your company’s top and bottom line.
Good Luck and Good Selling!!!
