6 Principles to Make the Most of Your Sales Metrics

Has your sales team met its quarterly target? A metric can tell you that.

But, why did your sales team miss its quarterly target? That’s something a metric cannot tell you.

Most sales organizations spend a considerable amount of time reporting various performance and productivity metrics. That said, they often struggle to use the data and information to understand the underlying causes of performance gaps. As a result, metrics seldom inform sales strategy and business decisions.

SEC finds that the best companies handle metrics slightly differently—they draw on clearly identified data to “tell the story behind the metrics”. They use metrics not as a performance tool, but as a means to spot problems early in the achievement of goals and course correct, if needed.

We recently spoke with David Bespalko, Corporate VP, North America Commercial Operations at Beckman Coulter, Inc. and Scott Kolar, VP, Sales Operations at Lexis Nexis, who shared their approaches to making the most of sales metrics initiatives. Specifically, they focus on six guiding principles:  

Narrow the scope of metrics
Adopt relevant metrics based on changes in the sales environment
Gauge performance at different stages of the deal
Establish benchmarking criterion based on similarity of roles
Share customer feedback with sales
Use dashboards as performance indicators

SEC Members, read excerpts from our conversation with David and Scott to learn more on how their companies apply these guiding principles in their metric initiatives to drive sales strategy and performance.

Also, see how your sales metric selection, reporting frequency, and dashboard design compares to your peers in the results from SEC’s latest Sales Metrics Benchmarking Survey.