The difference between measurement and management is clear. Measurement refers to passive monitoring and fixing occurring problems in a "fire-fighter" style, while management stands for a sustainability and improvement process. The question is: what does a typical sales manager do? Measure or manage?  

A quick look at a manager's toolkit can shed light on what's actually happening. If a sales manager is stuck to a dashboard, then it is obvious that he or she is focused on measurement. A sales manager monitors a current state and tries to address the problem highlighted by a KPI that has not reached the red zone. 

While dashboards are a must-have business tool, they support management process indirectly with irregular and subjective business insights. If a sales manager cares about strategy, he needs to add a scorecard in his toolkit or at least understand the difference between a dashboard and a scorecard. Here are four ideas that will help to shift a mindset from sales monitoring to sales monitoring and management.

1. Find a cause-and-effect connection

A sales dashboard has a measure that works as a warning signal. When this KPI goes into the red zone, it doesn't just fix the problem. It find a cause-and-effect connection between what has happened and the higher-level business objectives and priorities that form a strategy. By doing this, you are one step closer to the actual management.

2. Suggest an action plan

On the previous step you found success drivers of a certain sales process, also called a Critical Success Factor. Now you have a bigger picture of what's actually going on in the business and how a faraway strategic plan is actually linked to the sale. Come up with a plan that will make a change real.

 3. Convert a metric into a KPI

A sales dashboard is built on metrics, not KPIs. The difference is that a metric just shows the current performance of sales, while a Key Performance Indicator (KPI) also shows what you want to achieve. Make sure that important steps of your plan are linked to KPIs and each KPI has a target value.

4. Align a strategy to sales

Any business objective should be aligned with the goal of making a profit, e.g. improving sales or managing costs. Seeing this connection will help to focus a strategy on what actually matters. Make sure that you can build a cause-and-effect connection between the objective of improving profits and other objectives. 

I hope these four steps will help you to focus not just on sales monitoring, but on sales management.

About the Author

Aleksey Savkin is a founder of AKS-Labs, vendor of BSC Designer software and tools for software engineers. His areas of expertise are remote team management, Balanced Scorecard, KPIs, business performance management, general info-business development and marketing. Aleksey is the author of a number of articles and books on Balanced Scorecard. He runs Balanced Scorecard seminars in the Moscow Business School (MBS).

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