Which is the Most Important Sales Metric?

Feeling a little overwhelmed by all the new technology that seems to come out every month (almost every week)?

If you’re like most companies, then you’ve probably got enough technology in place to measure just about everything: talk time, conversion rates, number of demos being given, lead flow and lead placement in the funnel—top end, middle, and end stage of leads.

And now with A.I., you can automate just about everything else—including phone calls, voice mails, email campaigns, etc.

While working with a new client last week, his management team was asking me which metrics they should focus on as they begin to adopt the new best practice approach we just introduced.

Should they look at the increase in leads (or decrease because the leads will now be more qualified) or the number of opportunities?

Should they drill down on length of presentations?

How about numbers of calls? Contacts? Length of the first call?

While all things are important, my suggestion was to focus on the one metric that drives all the others: How the rep is performing while on the call.

What I stressed is to use recordings to measure how well a rep handles each part of the phone call. For example, what does your team say then they are told to “Just email me something”?

How about: “We wouldn’t be interested right now?”

How well does your sales team respond to the objection given at the end of the demo: “Can you send me those slides and let me share this with a colleague?”

Related: Sales Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect

Measuring your team’s response to these crucial selling situations is what drives everything else , especially your bottom line: Sales.

So here are some questions for you (whether you’re an independent producer or a sales manager or V.P. or business owner): Are you consistently listening to your calls, grading them, and using the lessons learned to perform better each and every day?

If not, then there is a danger for you to think that if you just make more calls or get more leads or put schedule more demos, then you’ll improve your closing percentage and make more money.

You won’t.

What you will do is waste more time and resources and generate more frustration.

What you need to do is improve your skills sets and improve the way you deal with the common selling situations you get over and over again. And once you do that, you’ll finally move the needle on all the other metrics.

So begin paying attention to and measuring the most important metric of all: How you and your team respond to the recurring selling situations you get day in and day out .

If you’d like to know how to improve those skills, then sign up for my new online training course which begins today! See it here.