One Hour Sales Retrospective for Salesforce.com Customers
Sales leaders look forward because opportunities exist in the future but isn't it important to look back sometimes?
It is important to look back sometimes to understand what is likely to happen in the future and to understand the reasons for performance.
Bad salespeople can chew-up opportunities. Good salespeople can achieve more with less. Mediocre salespeople can coast once they get to basic level of attainment. Sales leaders should be able to look at the data in the CRM system to help with this analysis.
However, many CRM implementations are disastrous. Not because of the configuration of the CRM System itself but often because of the way salespeople are using it. They see updating the CRM system "as feeding the pig". Even if salespeople who manage opportunities with diary entries for activity or logging email still spend time reviewing opportunities with their managers when there is no need because the data is already available to the managers the system.
It is heart-breaking.
Sales Performance Retrospective
What if there was some way to benchmark the level of effort going into opportunities? Not just logged activity against opportunities but activity with any contacts on the account or just the account? The effort might be even just updating the key CRM fields that show insight is be gathered, pipeline updated, opportunities progressed.
Managers could stop reviewing pipeline deal by deal, activity by activity. They could just get a snap shot of which opportunities are real based on historically successful levels of engagement.
Salespeople could get on with selling and only get help on deals where help was needed.
What if all that effort could be seen across the salesperson's historic opportunities? Not historic in the sense of D-Day or Napoleon but historic in the sense of what they have been doing as salespeople since they started getting paid to sell.
Could salespeople learn from what they have been doing and how that compares to their peers?
Yes.
PipelineCheck's Sales Performance Retrospective is a review of the work of salespeople.
Salespeople can learn from seeing how the best of their peers have applied themselves.
Like a Yayoi Kasuma retrospective PipelineCheck's Sales Performance Retrospective colourful. Salespeople are placed in different productivity quadrants (red, yellow, blue and green).
Opportunities are analysed by recent engagement level shown as red, amber or green.
Pipeline analysis based on weighted, recent effort.
There are flags on opportunities that might be too long at early stages or that have issues with the close date.
Effort, past due close date, bouncing close date, early stage for a long time.
Opportunity Effort Analysis
Who is working the opportunity? Is effort nearing a crescendo that suggests it will close? How does effort compare to previously successful opportunities.
Are pre-sales people making more of a contribution than the salespeople? Are the salespeople involving all of the people that they could in helping to win the deal?
Effort score by date and person on an opportunity.
Salespeople by productivity state (based on average effort and effect for their role).
EFFORT ON WON V LOST OPPS
Salespeople need to understand the win rates on their effort as well as their win rates on opportunities. Closing one in two deals is good but if all of the effort is going into two deals or went into a deal that was lost then the salespeople could be much more productive if effort was balanced better.
The data above shows that for one salesperson nearly 80% if the effort is leading to a win whereas for others it is the other way around. Imagine if the salespeople could see this and see which opportunities they were working after everyone else knew the war was over. They lost and it is time to move on but they don't. Can they learn to qualify better going forward? Can then use the time to generate more new opportunities? Can they ask hard questions to get a genuine sense of where this deal is going? The answers to these questions could make them more productive.
And remember the effort above is not just logged activities on the opportunities. It is a weighted activity score. It includes activity not related to the opportunity and it includes activity by other roles that may be supporting the account. It even includes a weighting for field changes like opportunity stage or value updates.
The Sales Performance Retrospective's effort engine calculates;
· average recent effort on won opportunities
· recent effort on individual open opportunities
· average lifetime effort on won opportunities
· lifetime effort on individual open opportunities
· lifetime effort v effect for each salesperson
· open opportunities due to close soon with low recent effort
· effort on won versus lost opportunities by individual
· effort on won versus lost opportunities by team
· % of total effort on won / lost opportunities by salesperson
· value of clean pipeline by month based on effort and 4 hygiene factors
Customers get a 60 minute web-conference on how to use the Retrospective to make suggestions to salespeople on how they could be more successful.
Sales managers get a coaching framework derived from analysis of CRM data that helps them coach sales people individually.
PipelineCheck's effort engine counts effort across objects including field updates and activities to give a comprehensive view of engagement on an opportunity.
Best of all the snapshot of performance and pipeline is instant for salesforce.com customers.
Salespeople and managers get the analysis on installation.
The Retrospective can even be done in a sandbox environment.
Native Salesforce.com Application
A few clicks will install this fully native salesforce package. This app includes the effort engine that scores the effort and effect. No data leaves the salesforce.com org so it is as secure as salesforce.com itself.
Why PipelineCheck?
PipelineCheck are sales productivity experts that have been working on salesforce .com since 2002. The company has worked with large and small customers to improve the performance of sales teams including O2 Telefónica, Three, LDC and others. PipelineCheck has assessed hundreds of thousands of opportunities across hundreds of salespeople.
What is involved?
The Sales Performance Retrospective produces easy-to-read reports and a dashboard on installation.
Dashboards using PipelineCheck's effort engine to review effort.
One hour of an analysis.
PipelineCheck does the installation, configuration and scoring so customers can put all their effort into selling and sales management. The analysis itself is delivered in a one hour web conference to the sales analyst who can then use it in conjunction with existing reports or review the Retrospective directly with the sales team.
What does it cost?
The intro price is £600 per team of comparable salespeople (normal price: £2,400). This includes the effort engine, the dashboard with the 10 insights and the 60 minute one-to-one guidance webinar.