Having your business goals/destination in mind is the first step towards effective management. But you cannot manage what you don’t measure. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) analytics are a vital resource for measurement, taking quantitative data analysis to the next level. KPIs represent the measurement of progress indicators, identified beforehand, toward organizational goals.

Frequent, routine review of KPIs gives you a glimpse of whether the processes are underperforming, need immediate attention, are on target, or exceeding your expectations. This information will help your leadership team make critical decisions that contribute to your company’s most important goals.

KPI analytics are typically available in mid-market CRMs, helping businesses stay on track to attack new customers, and attract new ones.

The most important categories of KPIs to watch are related to performance measurements, and can be broken down into three categories.

Past Measures

The information about your past business performance is vital in its right. By reviewing this information, you get a snapshot of the overall business health. For instance, when you have no closing sales today, it may imply that your product has not been performing well for months on end. If you fail to take action today, your business might as well reach a point of no return tomorrow.

Using KPIs, you can focus on your products past performance, profile your products and services’ strengths and weaknesses, reinforce on strengths, and improve on areas of weakness. They help you identify changes necessary for your business’ better performance, all while maintaining a competitive edge in your markets.

For example, sales may not be consistent. A good measurement will help you predict seasonal sales, and act accordingly. KPIs are important indicators in understanding your buyers’ behaviors over time, helping not only with stock or service issues, but also with marketing objectives in advance of high-sales seasons.

Knowing your seasonal sales also helps to reduce inventory costs. Instead of holding non-moving stock, you can always invest the capital elsewhere. Some underlying factors may drive down your sales in a particular season. For example, most companies close their stocks around the month of December. To clear their stock, they sell their products at considerably low prices.

KPIs helps you identify the particular seasons/periods the sales are low, and the possible reasons for such. If it is attributed to your key competitor clearing the stock and thus selling low, it helps you to make decisions about how to engage your markets and possibly improve your sales.

Current Measures

By using KPIs, you can evaluate your current position based on your sales or lack thereof, and determine a strategy to bring you closer to your goals. You not only get to know whether your sales are in line with your break-even mark, but you also get a glance of how much market share there is to capture.

Important business decisions are made using the sales figures. For instance, you get to determine whether you are in a position of meeting current supply and demand. If you are, do you have the necessary resources to deliver? What will adding orders and more work do to your quality of service? KPIs helps you answer questions like these.

Future Measures

KPIs, through pipeline analytics, provide a clear vision of all your business opportunities, regardless of their probability of closing. This is essential for the creation of effective sales tools, the organization of sales processes, and benchmarking of the sales team. Through KPIs, you can get within 5% forecast margin, implying that you are always aware of your current performance as well as the roadblocks and opportunities lying ahead.

Using a combination of these Key Performance Indicator categories within a CRM enables your leadership team to not only identify progress, but they also identify actions that are a priority in reference to outlining tasks for your team. KPIs are undoubtedly a vital part of CRM software, especially when businesses are measuring organizational performance.

What does the fourth quarter typically look like for a business? In most cases this quarter falls in-line with the holiday season. As a result, the majority of the focus remains in boosting sales and current revenues.

While this is an important time for any business’s bottom line, could this laser-focus toward sales serve as a mistake for leadership teams and executives? In many cases, management and executive teams set themselves up for failure at the end of the year by not effectively planning for what’s next.

Instead of simply focusing on the holiday rush, the final quarter should also serve as a time for leaders to step back and let their teams drive the business. While they’re a step back from the action, effective businesses are evaluating their year-to-date performance while planning for the future.

For example, McDonald’s recently deployed an all-day breakfast model to expand their fast food competition. While this is an important change that is creating quite a reaction, now is the time for corporate to evaluate the results of this change.

Additionally, Apple’s recent OS update to their Apple Watch has their perspective focused far beyond the flagship iPhone release. Their team is also currently assessing this performance to better understand how the road will proceed ahead for their business operations.

As these examples show, the importance of Q4 planning and analysis is critical. Here are five important components of that analysis that every team should follow. This list can ensure that any firm is better prepared for success in the next fiscal year.

1. Year-Over-Year Comparisons

Comparing current year data with previous years is one of the most important metrics a business can measure. This helps showcase performance, trends, growth and other critical areas of business operations.

Using reporting tools to compare key performance indicators can show how current sales and forecasts look within the market. Additionally, market reports cross-referenced with this data can help to better forecast what to expect for the next quarter within business.

In most cases this type of data measurement is easily accomplished through an integrative CRM platform. This type of data can be reviewed as a general overview – or more specifically within quarters, months and even the year-to-date. Both positive and negative trends can be better identify when compared within this context. Additional planning can be undertaken to help prevent ongoing negative trends – or to better address positive growth potential.

2. Cost Evaluation

Cost evaluation is one of the most challenging areas of any business analysis. After all, it’s the costs across a business operation that inevitably leech into revenue when left unmanaged. Subscriptions, term agreements, unchecked contracts and other factors can quickly add up to excessive costs against a company’s bottom line.

By remaining proactive in the analytics, businesses can better identify these costs. And they can devise solutions to reduce or even eliminate expenses that may be unnecessary.

One of the most common areas where costs can be reevaluated occurs within company health insurance. With the marketplace becoming increasingly competitive, more and more insurance packages are becoming available for businesses. In many cases, alternative plans with similar features and lower costs may be available for a switch.

Additionally, contract renegotiations may help to reduce spending. It’s important to remember that these companies are competing for business. Hence, a management team’s job is to leverage contract offers against one another to find the most competitive rates possible.

ISPs and other telecom service contracts are a prime example where costs can likely be lowered. By reviewing current plans, needs and available options, many businesses can reduce these costs by a significant margin. Even essentials such as rent or janitorial services can be reassessed to find cost-saving measures.

3. Product & Service Evaluation

Right alongside overall costs, planning for the future must also encompass an explicit evaluation of products and services. The goal of this phase is threefold:

• Make improvements.
• Make changes.
• Make cuts.

A company must stick with its mission and plan while holding true to the strengths that have contributed to success. If cuts are necessary, ensure that they are made with company strengths in mind.

While seeking out new opportunities is always great, it’s important that a company not spread itself too thin during the process. This stage can allow for planning – and exploring potential market opportunities. By planning ahead for analysis, a business can better set itself up for success. And they can readjust their business focus to remain more aligned toward their goals in the next year ahead.

Remember, making necessary cuts and spending adjustments does not show that a company is having financial trouble. Instead, it shows that they’re preparing for even more success in the future.

4. Employee Evaluations

The best employees to any organization are an investment to the company’s success. Accordingly, it’s important to measure each employee’s ROI and their direct contributions to a company’s potential future.

While layoffs and terminations are never an easy step, the truth is that performance is important within an organization. Without the right team in place, a business will never reach its greatest potential.

In many cases, employee evaluation comes down to assessing current workforce as well as investing in future growth. This could also include investing in fresh talent within new business areas to facilitate this type of growth.

5. Budgeting

Now that the planning has encompassed the major areas of operations, a realistic budget can be developed for the next year.

Utilizing a CRM or ERP software suite should come as no surprise within any organization’s operations. This software simplifies all the above-mentioned steps by compiling data and developing customizable, intuitive reports. This information can be used to quickly develop budgets that address all areas of a business – and plan with future market trends in mind.

Getting Ahead of the Curve

While this list contains many of the important steps a business should take in Quarter 4, it certainly is not exhaustive. There are all sorts of additional options that should be looked at for success. However, these five represent all the essentials any business management or executive team should address.

No matter a business’s size or scope, utilizing a CRM platform can enable even better analytics for improved fiscal performance into the future. These software packages help to compile data into intuitive reporting. That way, management can better forecast the business climate – and the best path forward.

“Bad habits are hard to break” may be better known, but the saying “bad habits are like a comfortable bed – easy to get into, but hard to get out of” should be a mantra of every sales manager. Often, bad habits come from the ease of a certain approach. In other cases, a lucky (or unlucky) success gained through a non-desired approach may cause an individual to stubbornly stick to it. Whatever the reason, bad habits can be a main cause for poor sales. To avoid them infiltrating your sales team, it’s important to recognize them and nip them in the bud. Here are 10 of the most common ones to spot.

“Camping” on an account.

A well known term amongst online gamers, “camping” refers to players who camp in a single location waiting for the easy kill, without having to apply much effort. It requires very little skill and is often frowned upon in the gaming community. Similarly, in sales, this refers to the habit of a sales rep “camping out” on a single, presumably large account, devoting all of his or her time and resources to it in hopes of a big payout, all the while eliminating the possibility of acquiring new and perhaps even larger customer accounts, and severely limiting growth opportunities for both the sales rep and the company. In the worst case scenario (regarding prospects still in the sales process), the sale could fall through, resulting in countless wasted man hours and zero revenue. In the case of an existing account, the customer could finally reach the inevitable end of the big sales and the overall need for his or her services, reducing any remaining requirements to maintenance or small re-orders. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is an excellent way to guard against this as it can keep track of the time and resources being dedicated to each client.

Spending too much time talking and not enough listening

Sometimes, the desire to convince a customer of a product’s value can translate into a one sided interaction – which is definitely not in the best interest of the sale. Every customer wants to know a sales rep has their best interest at heart. This requires listening carefully, so that at the end of a conversation, a rep can recap what they’ve learned about the customer and his or her needs. Not being able to identify the customer’s true issues and desired results leads to shoehorning a partial or inadequate solution that is sure to include painful and costly consequences after the sale that will leave your customer unhappy and could even threaten your company’s reputation.

Selling a product when they should be selling a solution

A sales rep should know everything about the product and all of its advantages. After highlighting these, however, they now must directly address the problem the customer has challenged them with and present the product as the one and only solution rather than simply an object. A product is something that may be useful and a customer will consider purchasing. A solution to their problem, however, is invaluable and almost guaranteed sale. When you sell a solution, you’re adding value to the sale and exhibiting yourself as an expert in your field. You earn a position of trust. The results are much more reassuring than suggesting a purchase by pointing to a page in a catalog.

Failing to understand the customer’s needs

In many cases, a failed sale is not due to the rep’s inability as a seller. Rather, it is because a very capable sales rep has failed to understand the customer’s needs. Perhaps the rep has approached a prospective customer about purchasing your company’s flagship product. In refusing, the customer may very well have expressed what his or her true needs are – needs that another product offered by your company will perfectly address. Every sales rep should always be on the lookout for such information – and to keep track of each customer’s particular needs, CRM software is again the perfect tool and can provide you with data for existing sales to customers with a similar profile or needs. Tracking the performance of your products and services in your CRM is a good way to predict how they will be received in future sales, giving you a upper hand when it comes to better understanding your customer’s needs.

Not taking control of the sale

A sales rep should always be empathetic and connect with the customer. However, under no circumstances should the customer take control of the process. When this happens, a customer can begin to derail the sales rep’s delivery model and can quickly become distracted when listening to your message. A successful sales rep has a formula for closing the deal, a proven path they take their customer down toward the close, regardless of how long or short the sales cycle. Directing your prospect down this path has a much higher probability of closing the sales than following customer’s often random, erratic lead.  A successful sales rep is sympathetic to a customer’s problem, but confident in his provision of the solution, thus keeping the customer in his process throughout.

Acting Desperate

Few things will shut a sale down faster than a seemingly desperate sales rep. When a rep begins to beg a customer for a sale it completely transforms the purpose of transaction. It becomes transparent the sale is no longer about the customer’s best interest, but those of the sales rep’s. This is a circumstance even the most naive customer would be quick to run away from. In the end it becomes more damaging than just losing the sale, it reflects poorly on your company and could even suggest the business is in distress.

Forgetting to follow-up

With each follow-up your sales rep is showing dedication and an interest in their customer. Well worded approaches such as “I wanted to ensure we’ll be able to solve your problem together” can quickly turn a maybe into a resounding yes. An added bonus is that it shows the customer the kind of service and loyalty they can expect when dealing with your business. The attention you give to your customer in the sales process is often perceived as the kind of service they can expect after the sale. This is an area where CRM technology truly shines. Follow-ups can be automatically scheduled, or reminders for manual correspondences given. CRMs can also be particularly handy if multiple people are involved in the selling process, so every interaction, plus future commitments, are available to anyone participating in closing the deal.

Being Too Pushy

It’s the stereotype that makes businesses avoid even using the latter word; that of the ‘pushy salesman.’ If acting desperate is the largest blunder a sales rep can make, being too forceful runs a very close second. Confidence is a sales rep’s greatest power. Pushiness is his kryptonite. Depending on your product or service, some customers may need time and even a consensus to make the right decision. It’s important to move the sale along, just know when not to push to hard.

Not knowing when to walk away

The phrase “anything to complete a sale” should not be taken literally – there are many things you should not do or commit to during the sales process. A sales rep who is unable to recognize that point where it’s time to end a sales pitch may find themselves in a position where they cannot deliver what they promised – or if they do, they might be negating the profitability of the sale altogether. Learn to assess and reassess the sale throughout the process. Does a potential customer seem exceedingly difficult from the beginning? If so, this may be one to avoid. Additionally, indecisive prospects can unnecessarily prolong your sales cycle, wasting your time and resources along the way until the sale fizzles to a loss.  Remember that time kills all deals. The longer the sales takes compared to your average closing cycle, the less likely it is that you will close the deal. Know when to walk away and focus your attention on opportunities that have a higher probability of converting.

Failing to eventually ‘ask for the no’

This may seem counter-intuitive, but a great sales rep knows that there is always the real danger of becoming hung up on an account where the potential customer will neither commit nor clearly reject the ongoing sales pitch. If things do not begin to tilt noticeably towards a sale, the representative must skillfully get the customer to admit he has no intention of buying before valuable resources are drained into this tenuous type of account. There is no harm in requesting updates on where the customer is in their decision making process. Always know where your prospect stands in the sale.

As a consumer aren’t you always impressed when the vendor you are buying from has made your purchasing process convenient, by offering online merchant services? Whether it’s ordering from your favorite pizza shop, booking a weekend getaway or shopping for the holidays, buying made easy gets you want you want quickly and is easy money for the vendor, creating a win-win for everyone. In fact in this day and age you would expect nothing less than e-commerce from vendors, and might probably think less of any vendor who didn’t offer the convenience of online transactions.

But not all business is transactional, meaning you can’t always order, pay and get your product delivered. Sometimes you need to request a quote, because your order has too many custom or unique elements. We often experience this when ordering products that require complementing services as well, like custom setup or installation for products such as kitchen cabinetry, flooring services, painting and so on. In these cases, each require estimates based on variables in your home that are unique to you.

These instances are consultative sales as opposed to transactional sales and require boots on the ground to provide accurate, custom pricing. One of the disadvantages of this kind of sale is it takes a time commitment for the vendor to provide pricing and estimates to the customer and more often than not, the customer is shopping multiple vendors to get the best pricing and services possible.

As the consumer, there are observations you’ll make in the buying process when selecting a vendor. Price and product quality and options are certainly at the forefront. What about the company’s image? The look of the truck outside the house or the salesman’s appearance and professionalism. They also play an important factor. I think we’ve all been discourage enough times by poor representation that it cost a vendor losing the opportunity to earn our business.

As the vendor, when competing for business, you need to do anything and everything you can to differentiate yourself from the competition. Time kills all deals, so as the vendor you’ll need to consider what you can do to shorten your sales cycle, especially in a bidding situation.

We already agree and appreciate the convenience of order automation, however, we’ve also determined that electronic ordering isn’t a solution for every business and industry, because not all transactions can occur online. But what about electronic quoting? Wouldn’t that be a valuable asset that could differentiate you (the vendor) from the competition and even shorten your sales cycle in come cases?

Providing accurate pricing options, quickly to your customers (even on the spot) in an electronic format could just be the advantage you need to win the sale. Here’s a few considerations.

• Automating your quoting process is the first significant differentiator in your sales process .
• Because the quote is a PDF document, prospects can share the document with other decision makers by simply forwarding it in an email.
• The customer has everything they need in a clean PDF format in order for them to review.
• Customers have the convenience of approving the document online.
• Throughout the sales process you can review how many times the customer has viewed the document or be alerted if they have even viewed it at all. This can help you gauge their interest and you can follow-up accordingly.
• Signed documents are automatically archived with the original quote and the customer profile.
• Your complete selling process is electronic and everything, including your customer’s approval is incorporated into your workflow.
• Your business is participating in an environmental conscience process.

Examples

These short tutorials provide you with an overview of 2 types of electronic quotes you can prepare for your customer in Mothernode CRM and ERP.

Download

The download option lets you send the quote electronically with a link to download. Once the document is downloaded, the viewing activity is recorded in the quote. The feature is also available for other types of transactions in various Mothernode editions, including Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, Change Orders, Work Orders and Invoices.

Approval

The approval process allows your customers automatically approve the quote and proposal in addition to downloading it. Customers will receive a copy of their signed transactions and Mothernode users will also be alerted to when the quote was approved and a digital copy will be archived with the quote.

Want to learn more about how Mothernode CRM and ERP can benefit your business? Schedule a demonstration for your business today.

http://www.mothernode.com/mothernode-demo/

Delivering quotes to your prospects in a timely and professional format can be an important influencer in your sales process, even more than you may think. It can demonstrate your company’s ability to quickly deliver results, even before the sale is made, which can have significant impact when it comes to winning business over the competition. Offering premium services to prospects and customers alike is a key differentiator, especially when you combine those services with competitive pricing.

But your customers aren’t the only ones who benefit from quote automation. Automating the quoting process also means streamlining and simplifying your own workflow. The ability to generate and deliver quotes faster means you can manage more business opportunities, with less effort. Essentially, Mothernode Quotes help you increase your close ratio and win more business in less time.

Here are a few Mothernode Quote features that can help you produce and deliver powerful, profitable quotes in record time.

1. Products and Services

Products and Services is a ‘light’ inventory feature available in all Mothernode products that allows to quickly add items to new quotes. This will save you time when adding common line items to your quotes by automatically populating item names, descriptions, price, markup, and even lets you determine if it is taxable or not. You can also configure select products and services to be added in to all types of transactions, like Purchase Orders, Sales Orders as well as Quotes. Other modules will depend on your Mothernode Edition.

2. Advanced Inventory

If you want more features for your goods and services and pricing needs, Mothernode’s Advanced Inventory Module gives users the ability to add multiple items with ease. You can add related and upsell products, set multiple pricing levels for each product, keep track of stock levels, create sales bundles and more. Using Mothernode Inventory is a great way to save time when adding items you sell to quotes and other transactions.

3. Line Item Notes

Add notes to each of your line items with the option to communicate special information internally or to your customer. When reselling goods and services from vendors, you can also notate your original pricing source for your internal records.

4. Margin Watch

Mothernode helps users stay on task when it comes to pricing by giving them the tools they need to make sure markups and margins are carefully guarded, so your business can maintain the profitability you expect. This option feature let’s Sales Managers and Business Owners alike determine their baseline margin options.

5. Sub Items

Mothernode users have the ability to combine one or more line items together and roll them up into a single item and cost. This is ideal for complex pricing needs or in situations where you don’t want to reveal costs associated with particular products or services.

6. Electronic Delivery

Mothernode gives users the ability to submit quotes to their customers and prospects electronically via email and downloadable link. Mothernode automatically let’s you know via notifications each time the recipient receives and downloads their quote. This fantastic feature helps users gage their recipients’ interest and confirms their proposal was successfully transmitted and received. Electronic delivery is also available to communicate other transactions, such as Purchase Orders, Invoices and Work Orders, in applicable Mothernode Editions.

7. Electronic Signing

Simplify your approval process by giving your customers and prospects the ability to electronically sign their quotes. Mothernode gives you the option to send your prospects an electronic version of the quote they can approve on their desktop, tablet and mobile device. They even have the option to sign with their finger. All signed proposals are archived with the original quote for quick and easy reference, and all parties are notified when documents are approved.

8. Collaboration

Users can interact with their colleagues when creating quotes. Social media style collaboration lets users request pricing assistance and communicate important decisions to people on your team. Notifications communicate necessary actions and updates to everyone involved.

9. Discounting Options

Global discounts are neatly communicated to your customer at the bottom of every quote. Users can also offer discounts for each line item, when needing to provide more aggressive pricing.

10. Tax Exempt Quotes

Users who often deal with Tax Exempt situations can easily include Tax Exempt IDs into quotes, which will automatically remove any applicable tax charges from quote totals.

11. Resorting

Add line items quickly and resort them for proper presentation when they’re completed. This time-saving feature lets you complete your work quicker and worry about format at the very end.

12. Multi-Currency

Whether you have offices around the globe or have a client base around the world, Mothernode lets you assign currency settings to your customers and vendors, so payment information is clear on all your Quotes, Invoices, Sales Orders and Purchase Orders.

As a CRM Vendor I often find myself not only selling software but offline solutions as well; mainly consultative services that help a business establish best practices in front of the keyboard and in front of the customer. It’s part of the value we have to offer in order to really help our customers improve their operations. After all, software alone isn’t the single solution that will save the day.

A natural part of providing solutions to your customer is discovering their philosophies and current processes. We do this so we can tailor a solution that complements and improves upon the workflow their already familiar with. Over the years we’ve had a chance to speak with thousands of people from a variety of industries to learn about sales needs and ultimately their sales process and find out what’s important to them in a CRM. While almost 95% of them had common needs in a CRM solution, like improved collaboration, calendar sharing, ease of use, mobility, tracking leads and opportunities, etc. we found the way CRM users are managing their sales teams and the metrics they were recording could be broken down into two categories; those who focus on their sales reps’ daily activities and those who focus on their accomplishments (usually on a monthly basis). In other words, micro sales management and macro sales management.

Why do we hire sales reps? Simple. To grow revenue. Growing your customer base and increase sales is the end result you’re looking for. Period. It doesn’t matter how they achieve that result either, by the way, as long as the results meet or surpass your expectations (and legal of course).

When you employ a sales rep, you hire them for a service; “Selling” and compensate them for a result; “Sales”. Lose sight of this and will cost you lost revenue, be an expensive mistake and could even bankrupt your business if not dealt with.

Sales can take time, and how much time all depends on your industry and where your prospects (or customers) are in their buying process. There are a variety of reasons (in fact too many to count) that can impact a company’s sales cycle. Far too often micro sales managers invest their time reviewing the wrong matrix. They get too lost in looking at their sales rep’s daily activity log an equating of the volume of activity with successful efforts. There’s a false feeling of comfort that can come from viewing activity analytics, like the number of calls made or emails sent during a given day. I’ve seen plenty of organizations in a variety of industries with sales reps who had greater sales results with fewer calls over a monthly period than their peers, mainly because they knew where and how to invest their time.  It’s true that sales is a numbers game and the more touch points you have, the more chances you have of closing a deal, but there is also a multitude of factors that are required to support that activity like experience, technique, personality, demand, price and so on. Setting expectations on HOW your sales rep sells boxes them into your process and not theirs. Sales is a talent, much like art. If a person had artistic abilities wouldn’t you let them work using their unique skills that make them successful rather than stand over their shoulder and instruct them on how to paint?

Keeping with the art analogy, you judge a painting on the end result, what the picture looks like when it’s completed, not how many brush strokes or colors it took to make it.

Volume of calls doesn’t necessarily mean quality calls.

On paper, Frank makes an average of 50 calls per day while Kelly only makes 10. A report like this offers a single dimension perspective and basically indicates that Frank makes more calls than Kelly and is probably a better sales rep. In reality, all of Frank’s calls may last an average of 2 minutes, while Kelly’s 10 calls could average 15 minutes. In this case, because Kelly is spending longer with her prospects on the phone, she’s actually advancing them further into the sales process by qualifying her prospects, determining their needs, identifying key decision makers, buying motives and so on. When you look at it from this perspective and understand the details, it becomes a little clearer that sometimes less can be more. But even in this example, the details in the duration of the calls are irrelevant from a sales management perspective because Frank and Kelly need to be measured on their results, not the details of their conversations. Face it, sometimes those details could be exaggerated and thus makes the details irrelevant to measuring their success. They need to be measured on one single criteria; the revenue they generate for your business. The number of closed deals, actual sales that they make in a given time period. Successful sales managers focus on the big picture; the results of their sales reps.

The Devil is in the details.

The details are still important, but usually best observed in postmortem to help you identify why someone is either more successful or less successful in their sales activity. They should be used to uncover relevant symptoms that can lead to an accurate diagnosis. Remember, there is a multitude of reasons why one sales rep can outperform others in your organization; experience, specialty, territory, technique, approach, product knowledge, geography, lead sources, number of existing customer relationships, just to name a few. Understanding the details by analyzing your business intelligence through reports and KPIs will give you a broader perspective of why and where you are seeing success and help you standardize these elements throughout your organization where and when possible. For some, finding the formula that works best could take years. This is particularly common in startups.

Measure your reps monthly, but keep on top of their weekly progress. Familiarize yourself with the activity they have in their pipeline and work towards closing those deals as well as growing your sales funnel. Give your sales team the flexibility they need to deliver the results you expect and make sure they have the support they need to succeed. Don’t get lost in reporting micro details that are insignificant values, stay on track with the big picture and keep your eye on the ball; making sure your monthly, quarterly and annual revenue goals are being met. Set your expectation on revenue, not activities. If you expect call quotas to be met, you’ll achieve call quotas. If you expect revenue goals to be met, you’ll achieve your revenue goals.

Shorten your “selling stages” and simplify your sales workflow.

Many of the leading CRMS will provide you with a wealth of business intelligence to help stay on top of your sales pipeline and give you a deeper perspective into the activities conducted by your sales team. In fact, in some cases it could be too much insight or overkill, having you decipher so much business intelligence your overlooking the basics or the obvious. When you look too closely at the wallpaper you can’t see the pattern.

Don’t get me wrong; the more analytics you can draw from your business, the better decisions you’ll be able to make, assuming your versed in understanding what to look for and your interest in your data is routine so you can record patterns, irregularities, trends and so on. Consistent monitoring of KPIs and reports are instrumental in understanding your data.

Two key criteria that are at the heart of every sales process are the Selling Stage and the Buying Stage, or to be more specific; where the customer is in your selling process and when you are in their buying process. Each company has their own Selling Stages and Buying Stages that are based on a number of factors, such as sales cycle, products and services, manufacturing and distribution lead times and so on. But despite your business and selling process, regardless of how you label these stages in your CRM one thing is consistent- All Selling Stages have a start and end point and all Buying Stages will prioritize which prospects deserve immediate attention.

Selling Stages

As a sales rep, from your first conversation with a lead, it’s your challenge and responsibly to qualify the prospect’s interest and overall needs and them guide them through toward a closed deal. Defining selling stages adds structure to your sales process and creates a common funnel that you can try and steer each prospect through. The better control you have over your selling stages, the more likely you are to close the deal. In fact, as many successful sales reps will share, you should have complete control over your selling process, you need to command the relationship, and always plan the next move for you and the prospect. Using Selling Stages will help you stay the course every time and develop a habitual track that is sure to increase your close ratio, by becoming more organized within your own sales process.

Define your selling stages

Selling stages have activities that include a beginning, middle and an end. When establishing your selling stages, it’s in your best interest to have as few as possible. More stages and more options will confuse and prolong your says process and as they say, “time kills all deals”. It’s also best to share your sells process with your prospect, so they have an idea of what to expect up front. This is another way you will take control of the sale.

1. Qualify.

Not every prospect is an ideal fit. The more you understand about your prospect’s needs, the better you have a chance of closing the business. If you’re not a right match, then it’s in your best interest to avoid the aggravation of dealing with an unhappy customer. The quick question (and hopefully obvious one) is, do you solve the prospects problem? If yes, move to the next round.

2. Presentation

Once you determine you’re a good fit, prove it. Show your prospect you understand their pain points and demonstrate how your product or service can add value by solving their problems and producing added benefits.

3. Draft Proposal

Sometimes pricing is straight forward, but sometimes options need to be considered, especially in consultative selling.  Produce draft pricing, estimates and options and then review them clearly with your prospect. This will give you the opportunity to achieve to very important activities in your selling process. 1) When presenting options you’ll better set expectations, and 2) You’re letting your customer determine their price point and solution, they feel in control in the pricing process, because you are giving them a choice in their purchasing. Just make sure you continue to command the selling process.

4. Final Proposal

Based on the results and decisions finalized in the draft pricing process you now present the prospect with the arrangement they chose and they’re ready to seal the deal with you.

5. Close

Your final selling stage ends with the prospects commitment to buy. They sign the deal and the sales order is initiated.

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