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Everyone knows sales is a numbers game, but not every company knows which numbers to track to win the game more often. You're losing sight of the bigger picture by focusing on obvious metrics. Sales revenue, meetings set, and the other usual suspects are great at face-value, but if you want longer-lasting results you need to examine the overlooked areas in your sales funnel.
Your sales funnel isn’t only the deals you close. It’s the leads coming in, what you do with prospects that don’t convert, and how you leverage happy customers. A system is only as strong as its weakest component. Incentivize these five uncommon metrics to strengthen your entire sales process.
Let’s have a moment of silence for all the qualified leads lost in your sales cycle. The average sales rep deals with A LOT of leads, and it’s impossible to save them all. The best way to save those sales is to pour lost leads back into the top of your funnel.
Reactivation campaigns target unqualified leads at the top of your funnel and nurture them until they’re ready to buy. Unfortunately, reactivation campaigns are only effective if they have leads to reactivate.
It’s easier for your sales team to label leads for reactivation than anyone else, as they’re usually the last point of contact. Incentivize your team to funnel uninterested leads into segmented email campaigns by rewarding the rep with the most saved leads each quarter. Maintaining contact with leads until they’re ready to buy will close a lot of deals further down the line, when your prospects are ready to buy.
How quickly your team responds to leads is a huge indicator of how likely they’ll close. You operate in a competitive environment. Whether you like it or not, your prospects have options. Every hour you don’t respond to a lead is another hour they can research alternate solutions. A faster response also makes it 7 times more likely you’ll speak with a decision maker.
You can even incentivize this behavior for free. Set-up notifications to alert your team when a lead shows interest. You can set-up lead alerts in Salesforce to notify your team as soon as new leads become qualified. The fastest rep wins - and so does your sales process.
Reward your fastest responding reps with increased commission. This will enable a continuous flow of leads into your funnel and it’s also a natural way to bring healthy competition into your organization.
Sales velocity is how quickly deals move through your funnel. See a breakdown of the equation here. The faster your team closes deals, the more time and resources you have to manage the rest of your sales process. Slow deals sap energy from your team and money from your budget.
Busy reps slow down deals. They have less time to answer questions and overcome objections. Conversation dries up and details are forgotten. The best way to overcome sales lethargy is by incentivizing sales velocity.
Reward your reps with the fastest deals the same as the ones closing the biggest deals. The faster sales cycle will reduce stress in the rest of your funnel and allow deals to flow in more smoothly.
Referrals generate 300 - 400% more ROI versus other types of leads, making them essential in your sales strategy. Referrals remove stress from your sales team by letting customers do the selling. They’re the best indicator of happy customers, so they should be a priority for your sales team.
Unfortunately, only 7% of reps ask for referrals. Most reps worry they'll damage an existing relationship, so they don't try asking. Luckily, you can incentivize referrals internally and externally with very little effort.
An external referral program incentivizes customers to refer others to your product. Amazon gift cards are simple ways to persuade happy customers into referring friends and coworkers. Everyone wins!
Internally, you should incentivize your sales team by offering a commission to the rep with the most referrals each quarter. The value of a referred customer far outweighs the initial cost of obtaining them, and your reps have direct access to huge sources of valuable referrals.
Your CRM shows the health of your company, but only if you feed it accurate information. If your team isn’t entering real results from the field you aren’t getting a clear picture of your market. This prevents you from developing an informed strategy.
Your reps are the biggest influence on your CRM’s accuracy. They’re the direct link to your customers and the first line of defense for the integrity of your CRM data. Many reps don’t update their CRM as often as they should. This could be due to the lack of mobile access, or even a lack of time. Never underestimate the busy schedule of a sales rep.
The best way to get the whole team to update their CRM regularly is to reduce the friction of using it in the field. Badger Maps, for instance, syncs with Salesforce in the field and updates sales activity effortlessly. Badger acts as a routing and scheduling app that also visualizes your CRM data, giving your team immediate access to their customers and routes all at once.
Reward your reps for CRM usage streaks by tracking their activity in Badger. Incentivizing a systematic approach for meeting customers and updating CRM data ensures your data is consistently updated. This keeps your CRM fresh and valuable when it’s time to strengthen your sales strategy.
Developing the right incentives is a topic on its own. You’ll need to honestly examine where your funnel needs improvement and align the appropriate metrics to fix it. This is the backbone of your sales strategy. Incentivizing the quality of your metrics is the best way to improve them.
Incentivizing behavior creates powerful changes throughout an organization, the results of this behavior pay for themselves with the improvements they create in your sales process. Start driving the results you need today for a stronger sales funnel next quarter.
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Tim Jernigan is a Product Marketing and Business Development Specialist at Badger Maps. Badger is a sales routing app that provides automatic territory management, helping field sales reps take action on their customer data. It integrates with Salesforce and visualizes the customer data on a map. Reps use it to optimize schedules, routes to get more meetings and sales.
