How to Track Sales Results the Right Way

Sales Management

This article is from Jason Rozenblat, Director of Sales, Mobile Apps at CrowdCompass, a CVENT company. Please check out the CrowdCompass Blog and follow @CrowdCompass on Twitter.

I recently went through an exercise with my team and it opened my eyes to something very important. If you want to track ANYTHING in sales management, you need to have consistency and standardized best practices with your reps. Otherwise, pulling any relevant data will become virtually impossible.

A good example of this is when working with a rep on their “sales math”. The goal of sales math is to come up with unique metrics for each rep to lead them to success, which most of the time means hitting budget/quota/goal/etc. The ability to do this properly is heavily reliant on good, clean data. Whatever CRM you’re using, make sure that whatever you ultimately want to track is kept in a clean, consistent format.

For example: I recently wanted to track how many proposals my team was sending, how many of those proposals turned into opportunities and how many ultimately resulted in closed deals. This was a great coaching opportunity for my reps. I found that some reps sent more proposals, but closed less deals. Was it the quality of the proposals? Was it their follow-up? Were they sending proposals to unqualified prospects?

What I discovered is that reps were using different subject lines and different methods of sending proposals, which made it very difficult to go back in time and pull good data. Some were even using completely different proposals (another good coaching opportunity altogether). I quickly created a standardized way of sending proposals and tracking them so that I can run accurate reporting and coach my reps.

If you want to track how many pricing proposals your team is sending out, how are you tracking that? Are some reps sending proposals and not properly logging them in your CRM? Is it consistent across all of your sales people? It has to be easily tracked and reportable.

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