Are your team's conversions as high as they could be?
One of the key ingredients for a manager running a sales organisation, is knowing his team's sales conversions intimately on a daily, weekly monthly and YTD basis.
If he wasn't doing this, we really wouldn't know whether his team was maximising sales opportunities as effectively as they could be.
Recently I had a manager say to me: 'I don't need to analysis my sales team's figure as I know we are selling more than we were last year'.
They may well be, however, is that due to the team being more effective than last year or is it due to the fact they are receiving more enquiry than last year? We wouldn't know the answer to that unless we had comprehensive sales data.
Having comprehensive conversion data gives us the ability to coach individual sales people in the areas where they need it.
Sales person A may have a brilliant conversion rate, of getting internet or telephone enquiry people to turn up at the showroom. However, the data may show that his conversion of getting those people to purchase may not be so great.
Sales person B data could reveal that his conversion of enquiries to the showroom visits is below the team average.
With this information, it makes the manager way more effective in being able to grow his team. If we then coach sales person A into converting more showroom visits into sales, he will obviously sell more product. If we coach sales person B into handling internet, telephone enquiries more effectively, so he gets more visits to the showroom it's obvious his monthly sales will improve dramatically.
We have seen cases where systems have been put into place to record conversions, and it has revealed that some of the top performers were in fact churning a large number of potential clients to hit their monthly targets.
If we are coaching our entire team on their individual needs, it will have a dramatic positive impact on our monthly figures. The only way to do that effectively is if we have ongoing conversion data from all perspectives.
To be an effective manager we need to be quickly reviewing this data on a daily basis. We all know that even our top performers can fall from their A game. It's a bit late to realise, half way thru the month, that a couple of our salespeople aren't performing to their optimum. To many missed opportunities have been snapped up by our competitors!
This sort of data is also great to inspire other team members to reach higher goals, and also brilliant for setting individual and team bonuses. If we focus on more effectiveness in all of our activities, we will inevitably sell more product.
One particular company we work with on a six weekly basis has such comprehensive data, that when we arrive there for our two-day coaching sessions, we know exactly what coaching needs to be done with every individual team member. This has ensured continued growth in all their conversion rates.
We always know how we are going - compared to the corresponding weeks, months from the previous years - which ensures everybody is accountable for their individual and team results.
The fantastic thing with technology is that it's not that hard to have all this data at our fingertips 24/7. In my early days of sales management I always knew exactly how every individual team member was performing in all conversion areas on a daily, weekly, monthly, YTD basis, it's just that it was a labour intensive method in ledger format.
It was worth the effort though, as it allowed us to continually grow our people, which in turn grew the monthly sales figures.
