Hey sales manager, here’s five things to track in your CRM

As a sales manager, you will be asked to track the performance of your sales team. Overall sales are an obvious and easy measurement, but the underlying factors that affect your sales performance are what you actually need to keep track of. Looking at the headline figure for sales growth or decline won’t tell you what is causing that to occur. You need to delve into the rest of the numbers to gain a clear picture of what’s happening.

“Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the current buzzword for sales tracking,” says Phil Mayling, Sales Director of MKG Foods (and BuddyCRM user), “but I prefer to say we are measuring and managing INPUTS. Too often, sales managers judge their sales people only on OUTPUT, i.e. sales. This is not managing, it is just judging. Whilst sales figures are no doubt the key judgement on a salesperson, you can’t manage and coach someone on that. It would be like a 400m coach simply saying ‘your time isn’t good enough.’ You wouldn’t be very astute in judging a performance like that. You need to look at running style, drive phase, head position, kick etc.”

Your CRM can help with that process by recording the key inputs that your sales team contribute to gaining sales.

So, as a sales manager, you need to define what key inputs you will measure and manage. You can’t have too many, or your team loses focus.

Here are five of the key inputs in our businesses and in other companies we have worked:

1) Number of calls and meetings with prospects and customers.
Activity still breads success.

2) The number of different prospects being spoken to/ met with.
All that activity isn’t any good if you get stuck just talking to the same people

3) Number of quotes/proposals being produced

4) Number of opportunities being created/progressed

5) Opportunities win rate

Start tracking these five sales indicators in BuddyCRM from here on, and watch your sales climb.