sales metrics
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The Biblical Sales Force Part 3 – Numbers: Metrics and KPIs
- November 23, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In my experience, most companies have KPIs in their sales organizations but the real issue is usually whether or not the KPIs they trot out actually drive revenue. In most cases, they do not.
KPIs must be forward looking indicators, not lagging, or backwards looking results and most companies fail to make that key distinction. While last month’s revenue and gross profit numbers are an indicator of how the company performed (past tense), they do not indicate how the company WILL perform (forward looking).
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Focus on Winning to Drive More Sales and Revenue
- February 20, 2024
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
In baseball, the coaching staff gets a report from their advanced scouts and from that report the coaches create a game plan. How to pitch to that hitter, how to get this hitter out, what to expect from this pitcher, what pitch he likes to throw when he’s ahead in the count, the strength and accuracy of the outfield arms, etc.
Some companies do some account planning for major accounts, but not nearly enough of this takes place.
What will happen to your business if you spend more time thinking about how to win, and less time focusing on your numbers?
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How To Stop Sucking by Understanding and Changing Your Sales Metrics
- August 30, 2021
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Suppose a company reports that its win rate is 24%. Does that tell you anything other than they suck? It doesn’t tell us how badly they suck, why they suck, how long they’ve sucked, who sucks, or whether there is any hope for them to stop sucking. And even if their win rate is double the 24%, the same questions apply. Let me explain.
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The New Salesenomics
- May 24, 2019
- Posted by: Kurlan & Associates, Inc.
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
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Popularity Polls are Just Like Sales Management Tracking Metrics!
- January 8, 2019
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Have you ever watched a news program where they presented poll results, like the number of people in favor of legalizing marijuana? The poll shows popular opinion, but not the facts, logic, or impact on arrests, the economy, traffic accidents, unemployment, addiction, death rates, etc. There is a huge difference between people’s often uninformed opinions, versus what the facts might suggest. That’s the problem with the statistics I’m going to share in this article. The stats show what sales managers are doing but those managers are largely uninformed. They don’t know what’s good for them, haven’t been asked or held accountable to doing it differently, and aren’t in any way shape or form following best practices. John Pattison, Objective Management Group’s COO, mined some data on salespeople who report to sales managers. I was appalled by what I saw. Check this out!
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Can Sales Statistics be Bad and Good at the Same Time?
- February 21, 2018
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
I received two pieces of bad news relative to statistics.
The first is about my award-winning Blog. It seems that readers stay with an article for an average of only one-minute or so. That means that most readers don’t finish the article, fail to get to my summary, and often don’t read long enough to get my point. Basically, everything that comes after the fourth paragraph is not being read. This could also be good news. It could mean that I can actually write shorter articles and that would be great for me!
The other piece of bad news relates to my award-winning sales training company, Kurlan & Associates. I reviewed 5 years worth of statistics on opportunities that weren’t closed and it seems that prospects were 6 times more likely to do nothing than to do business with a competitor. We don’t lose very often and I can count on two hands the number of opportunities I have personally lost in the past 5 years. But it’s one thing to rarely lose, and another to learn that 6 times more often than not, a company failed to act. But these statistics are very misleading. Let me explain why.
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How Better Accountability Causes Sales Performance to Increase
- January 4, 2016
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
Sure, having goals is important, but having them in writing, with an achieve by date and a plan is exponentially more likely to have an actionable outcome than only having goals. And if you really want results, accountability is to goals as the accelerator is to the automobile. They both cause immediate action. Here’s what I mean.
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Increase in Social Selling Yields No Improvement in KPI’s
- November 5, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
For all the attention that these sites get, for all the salespeople who now spend their evenings perfecting their profile, adding people to their networks and asking for introductions, what hasn’t changed for the better are these key metrics:
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The Monumental Effort Required to Grow Sales in 2014
- October 15, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
When you look ahead to sales for the next 12 months, are you using the same assumptions as always? If you want to grow by 20%, do you use the same metrics for next year that you used for last year? Will the plan that got you there last year continue to work next year? Have you accounted for any of these changes?
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Sabermetrics for Sales Leadership – Projecting Sales Revenue
- May 28, 2013
- Posted by: Dave Kurlan
- Category: Understanding the Sales Force
What if there was a way to project sales success even more so than what Objective Management Group has mastered during the past 23 years?
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