Tracking Sales: What Gets Measured, Gets Managed

When you take a step back and look at your sales from an outside perspective you can learn a great deal about your business and you can easily spot the flaws in your business and sales model.

 

This is why so many companies hire a third party consulting company to come in and evaluate their business. An unbiased opinion is generally worth the money that they cost. When you convert this line of thinking to your sales and your sales team the same ideas hold true.

 

There is a lot of value in stepping back and taking an unbiased look at how you are doing with regard to your sales data. Are you meeting your sales goals? Are their days of the month where you consistently outperform your goals? Are their days of the month where you consistently fall short of your goals? Are their certain sales techniques that have been proven to convert at a higher rate? Are their sales techniques that simply do not work? You can find answer to all of these questions by instituting a thorough analysis of your sales and the methods at which you arrive at those sales.

Peter Drucker's saying "What Gets Measured, Gets Managed" means that every piece of data you measure and analyze within your business is an additional piece of data that you can use to help your sales improve. Without knowing where you are doing well or not doing well, you do not stand a chance of making improvements in those areas.

Once you begin to start measuring your sales goals you will quickly find the right pieces of data that you will need to consistently track. Tracking the wrong data is as useless as not tracking at all, sometime it can be much more harmful! You should track data such as your conversion rates, conversion points, goal progress, and efficiency. These points will allow you the best chance of taking the data that you collect, analyzing it, and turning it into solutions that will actively help you increase your sales numbers.

 

The main point with all of this is to make sure that you are inspecting the parts of your business that need inspecting. There is no sense to analyze something that will not help your business improve. With a consistent method of finding the right data points to measure you will be able to more effectively manage your sales and bring in more income.