How Do You Know?
How do you know if your team are performing ?
Come on, be fair. How do you know if your team are performing as you want?
Come to that, how do you know if you are?
Putting measurements on yourself can feel really tough as it feels like you’re adding additional pressure on your shoulders, on top of all the other challenges of running a business. However, if you’re not holding yourself accountable to any kind of measurements, what example are you setting to your team?
It’s really easy to talk yourself out of creating a robust sales process with strong sales projections, even more so when your you may be lacking confidence yourself in selling, as so many business owners we talk to are. Yet often we find that it comes down to not talking to enough people, not making enough people aware of what you do and so hiding your genius that is the cause.
They beat themselves up because they believe they can’t sell, and their conversion rate is low when it finally filters down to them not having enough conversations.
Does your team think its under performing ?
Your team think they are under-performing but how do they know?
This is something Julia talks about on her recent podcast:
To understand this thoroughly, you need to have some goals in place. These goals are:
Growth Goals; where do you want your business to be in one to two years?
Revenue Goals; what revenue does your business need to generate to get there?
Sales Goals; how many of your services do you need to sell to achieve that revenue figure ?
Activity Goals; based on your current conversion rate, how many conversations do you need to be having to hit those sales goals?
What different do goals make ?
Once you have these projections in place, then you can start to understand if you are under-performing.
If you are, please don’t start flailing yourself with a big stick. That will end in tears. The more grown-up way of dealing with that is to calmly look at where you could improve your sales process, so that you are finding more prospects and converting more to customers.
If you’re not motivated by money, that shouldn’t stop you from performing this exercise. (The goal setting, not the stick thing). You may be motivated more by the amount of people you can help, the more customers you have or the more widgets you can sell.
If that’s the case, base your projections on those things that do motivate you, and set your Key Performance Indicators accordingly. They then become the measurement for you to assess whether you are under-performing or not, and whether your team is meeting the targets you set them.
Using KPI’s to monitor your progress
Through regular measurement against these KPIs, you can see whether your activity is above, on or below target. If it’s above or on target, then be fair to yourself and your team and spread the love. If below, then treat this as your early warning system that something in your sales process needs to improve, whether that be marketing activity, lead time to sale or perhaps pricing.
Putting a strong sales process in place, with meaningful KPIs that are relevant and motivational to you and your team, can then lead to you hitting the numbers you need, to attain the business growth you want.
Then you’re in the know.
Want to have a conversation about what makes a good KPI ?
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