A lot of sales managers try to control metrics which can’t actually be controlled. Not only is that fruitless but it means they miss the metrics they can and should control. Knowing what to manage can make a big impact on the revenues and performance of your sales and marketing people.
Revenues are every company’s objective, and sales mean revenues. So companies deploy sales managers and sales-management processes to keep those sales revenues coming. But after a while, they’ll increasingly ask are the efforts really paying off?  Is the sales management procedure adopted by the company really effective?
Recently, some research was conducted by Harvard into just how effective sales management really is and whether sales performance could actually be managed. And it turned out, much of it isn’t.
They took a lot of data from sales leaders of various industries related to the metrics that the company leaders monitored.
What they found is that it is very difficult to control certain top-level metrics related to Revenues and Market share. These were found to be lag indicators or outcomes and not at all something that could directly be managed. Companies attempting to manage around these outcomes found too many variables outside their control and risked frustrating their senior management, sales managers and sales staff.
At the middle-level position was the metric related to Sales Objectives like conversion rates. They were not as distant as outcomes like revenues, but they were results that could still not be managed, directly.
The third-level was Sales Activities. These were specific actions and responsibilities that could be managed. Companies that recognized this achieved better control.
Strategy and Action have always believed in measuring results but managing activities. Through our sales-management improvements, companies have been able to increase outcomes and results by managing activities.
Just as Harvard found,  it is the metric of sales activities that are manageable. Activities lead to end results and therefore, they must be the focus of your company’s management and leadership.
For example… one of these metrics that need to be measured is the number and quality of leads processed. A sales team is given certain leads which they must follow to convert prospects into new customers. Communications get recorded, meetings don’t occur without first setting an expected outcome, and the actual outcome gets recorded, too.
And logging the time spent by each sales person on the various tasks and clients adds to unaccountability.
If you measure the right metrics, you’ll achieve your higher-level objectives.
