Managing sales meetings as a Salesforce company means that how you run these meetings will be different from how other sales managers (that don’t have real-time information at their fingertips in the CRM) run theirs. With so much data in the CRM, this article explores the specific ways that you can leverage this data for more effective meetings and more profitable sales.

Standardise the dashboards that will be used during the sales meeting

Each sales meeting should be based on information that is contained in the CRM, this enables everyone to rely primarily on hard data rather than opinion. In most companies we build dashboards that measure the key performance activities and metrics for each salesperson and the team as a whole. These dashboards will contain up to 20 unique measurements, and while these measurements will be unique to each company, they are typically focused on topics such as;

• Review ‘benchmark’ items such as number of sales meetings completed, number of open opportunities, communication cadence with identified key prospects or customers

• ‘Stuck’ Opportunity discussion

• Three-month forecast (next 90 days) / Quarterly forecast (current financial quarter)

• Sales quota achievement

• Changes to the pipeline (value, close date, sales stage) since last sales meeting

• ‘Course Correction’ action items. Review action items that have been identified to meet specific targets. An example of this would be following a review of the 90-day forecasts it might show that isn’t enough pipeline to meet the sales quote in 90 days. The action item may include working with marketing to ramp up lead generation activities, or to delegate some account management activities to free up time for prospecting.

By basing each sales meeting on consistent metrics in the dashboard, this coaches your sales team to focus on the sales activities that are being measured (what can be measured can be managed).

Use historical data to predict future outcomes

I mentioned ‘Course Correction’ in the section above. In my opinion, one of the sales managers’ most valuable contributions to the overall success of the team is the ability to identify where a salesperson needs to take corrective action to hit their target and to be specific in what that course correction needs to be.

How can the sales manager develop these skills? The short answer is ‘in the data’. There are a number of metrics that the sales manager can understand based on the evaluation of the historical records in the CRM.

Some of the metrics that should be understood are

• How long does it typically take to close a deal? This metric will be complicated by other factors such as deal size, product

• What is your win ratio versus specific competitors?

• What’s the ratio between pipeline value at the start of the month or quarter and the final sales figure at the end of the period.

• How many leads are required to create a converted opportunity?

• How many new opportunities are required to close one deal?

• How many people at the prospect company need to be actively engaged before you can create an opportunity? What roles (marketing, sales, purchasing, CXO, etc) should be engaged

If the sales manager understands these key metrics, they can be used to refocus the individual salespeople on the deals and activities that are most likely to lead to them hitting their target.

Invite the marketing team for review of conversion rates

Most sales teams rely to some extent on the inbound leads that the marketing team is generating via PPC campaigns, events, content marketing, etc. In many companies there isn’t always a clear feedback loop from the sales team to the marketing team on which campaign or types of leads are most valuable. As a Salesforce customer you have an advantage here, as each lead can be tracked from its origin (such as a click on a Google ad), all the way through the sales process to a closed sale.

While the marketing team will be able to see much of the data that they need via the Salesforce reports, they will usually have some requests from the sales team with regards to data. One of the usual issues that the marketing has with sales is when Opportunity records don’t have ‘Contact Roles’ populated with the prospects that the sales team is selling to. When this happens the marketing effort (generating leads) is automatically disconnected from the sales effort (working on opportunities). As a result, the reports that the marketing team is working on will be inaccurate.

Tenacre Group provides Salesforce administration packages that enable the development of custom reports and dashboards as mentioned in this article.

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