Beyond the Numbers: Top 2 Areas to Assess Your Progress Towards Sales Excellence
The following is adapted from P3 Selling by Greg Nutter.
Early on in your sales experience, it’s difficult to know for sure if you’re really making progress. We work hard at making calls and putting together proposals, glance up at the scoreboard at the end of each month or quarter, then put our heads down again, hoping to make our numbers for the next reporting period.
But the numbers are just a reflection of our ability to perform a wide range of different activities. As such, it’s essential to periodically stop and ask yourself which ones you do well and which ones you could do better.
The psychologist John Dewey noted that “We don’t learn from experience — we learn from reflecting on experience.” For sure, there are many different sales activities you could reflect on. To make things easier, I’d like to suggest you start by regularly assessing your performance in just two areas: Sales Call Effectiveness and Pipeline Health.
Accessing Sales Call Effectiveness
Developing a high-level call plan prior to every sales interaction is a critical element in maximizing your chances of success, where success means moving the buying-decision Process forward in your favor. This plan defines the call’s objectives, outcomes, areas to explore, and proposals to present.
A rough way to measure Sales Call Effectiveness is by asking yourself how often you realize your high-level call plans. Specifically, how frequently do you achieve the call objectives and outcomes you set to move the buying decision forward. If you believe it to be less than 75 percent of the time, look for ways to improve.
Typically, this involves either asking better questions to understand and influence a prospect’s Problems, People, and Processes, or suggesting more compelling proposals that link to these areas. In most cases, developing better call plans or practicing specific selling techniques is the answer.
Assessing Your Pipeline Health
Pipeline management is about prioritizing your overall activities to ensure a steady, predictable stream of sales revenue. It utilizes a seller’s pipeline, which is a snapshot in time of the buying-decision stages of each potential sales opportunity.
To assess your Pipeline Health, look for buying-decision stages where you either have very few opportunities or where many of your deals seem to cluster. Sellers often have gaps in their early stages that commonly point to insufficient or poorly executed prospecting. This situation can be resolved by either improving your prospecting message and process or simply dedicating more time to it.
Your journey to sales excellence will not happen overnight. It takes practice, consistency, and regular self-evaluation. You can tell people how good you are, or you can show them how good you are, and regularly assessing these two areas of your sales performance will help you to become the best.
For more advice on how to effectively evaluate your B2B sales performance, you can find P3 Selling on Amazon.
Greg Nutter is the founder of Soloquent, Inc., helping business owners and senior sales executives solve revenue growth problems through direct, indirect, and multi-channel sales models. With over thirty-five years of experience, Greg has worked with a wide range of companies to develop strategies, programs, processes, and tools to grow revenues, enter new markets, increase sales consistency, maximize selling investments, and develop skilled sales, channel, and management personnel.
In addition, Greg has offered his expertise on a wide range of sales performance topics through hundreds of executive briefings, workshops, and keynote speeches throughout North America, South America, Asia Pacific, and Europe. Learn more at www.P3Selling.com.
