Every sales VP wants to create a sales structure that converts the highest amount of leads possible. Unfortunately, many struggle to create a sales structure that will turn their sales team into a high-performing group.
Sales architect Andy Farquharson helps companies build and improve their sales process and training methodologies. When it comes to optimizing the sales process, Farquharson believes the key is to define your sales process by mapping out each individual step and then measuring the efficiency of them. That way you can see where and what to tweak to improve your sales process.
When sales achieves an ideal sales structure, the money follows. When sales underperforms, the sales reps might be the first to feel the effect, but the whole company will soon feel it if it’s not corrected quickly. Luckily, a metric exists that will help you figure out how to structure your team to make it a high-powered sales machine.
Sales Opportunity Funnel
The Sales Opportunity Funnel metric tracks how successful each of your sales reps are at each phase of the sales process and shows their closing rate. A sales VP can gain many powerful insights from this one metric.
Viewing the Sales Opportunity Funnel as a stacked bar and line chart makes it easy to see how well a sales rep converts leads through the sales pipeline and what their closing rate is. This metric tracks how many leads a sale rep received, how many leads the rep made contact with, how many of those contacts turned into meetings, how many of those progressed to wanting a proposal, and finally, how many of those lead to closed deals. Knowing this information will help you create a more effective sales process and team so your profits can increase.
According to a Harvard Business Review study, 50% of high-performing sales organizations have a closely-monitored, well-structured sales process, compared to 28% of under-performing organizations.
The Sales Opportunity Funnel metric can identify who excels at setting meetings, giving demos, closing deals, etc. With this information, you know where to place your sales reps, AE1s, AE2s and so on. Now you can send your very important leads to your best closers.
Identifying who is best at each stage of your sales process also allows you to study what efforts make them so successful so you can teach them to your other sales reps. This allows you to improve different aspects of your whole sales team and create a team that performs at maximum efficiency.
If the metric above represented data from your business, you might see that Michelle Lewis had the highest closing rate for the month. However, she received the second lowest amount of leads. Paul Smith, on the other hand, received the second highest amount of leads but had the lowest closing rate. If things have been this way for a while, you should adjust the number of leads each rep receives. You should also see what Michelle does that makes her such a good closer and teach it to the other reps so your team can close more deals and become more profitable.
This metric was built using data pulled from Salesforce. Grow can also create this metric with data pulled from other CRMs like Base, HubSpot, Zoho, Pipedrive and others which you can view here.
