When B2B sales organizations focus on activity-based metrics, the activities often don’t align with consultative and strategic opportunity pursuit sales motions.
While activity-based metrics have some value, an over-emphasis on quantity rather than quality often fails to achieve the expected sales results. The number of phone calls or tasks completed is a poor substitute for meaningful sales activities in most organizations.
Emphasize Outcomes Rather Than Activity
The optimal approach for quality sales activities is to focus on outcomes aligned with meaningful progress toward prospecting and selling goals – In other words, don’t focus on the activities count. Focus on the activities that count.
Shifting the sales team’s focus to meaningful outcomes enables the sales team to do fewer things more effectively. For example:
– Make fewer calls, but plan them better
– Have fewer meetings, but conduct them more effectively
– Conduct fewer demos but with better results
– Submit fewer proposals but with higher win rates
– Shape more proposals with multiple products to provide more competitive differentiation
– Present more proposals to target accounts that are more lucrative
Measure What Matters
The first step to measuring what matters is not to confuse activity with progress. Otherwise, you’ll inadvertently drive salespeople to check the action done box rather than motivating them to make intelligent quality-based choices.
The transition to outcomes-based activities can be bumpy as there may be an initial gap in traditional “touch” metrics as the new metrics begin to take hold and show results.
Whatever sales activity metrics your organization chooses to measure, ensure that the metrics correlate with your goals.
If you’d like an assessment of the alignment of your sales activity metrics to goals, let me know!