No matter your industry, B2B sales are always a human-driven process. Even with new approaches to marketing automation and the growing use of innovative technologies, your customers are still humans looking to meet their specific needs.
Human-driven, customer-centric sales aren’t mutually exclusive from a scientific approach, however. In fact, the only way to measurably improve your customer-centered B2B sales process is with scientific metrics that quantify your team’s strengths and weaknesses throughout the sales cycle.
Here are three insightful and valuable B2B sales metrics you shouldn’t overlook:
Metric #1: Factor In The Right Sales Team
The right sales team makes or breaks your revenue generation efforts. That’s why hiring and training the right team is an integral part of successful B2B sales.
Before hiring a sales team (or before outsourcing sales to a partner), ensure candidates complete a hiring assessment that tests specifically for sales-oriented strengths such as aptitude, logic and aggression. There are plenty of reliable, high-quality tests available, but it’s important to use the same one consistently and leverage the resulting data.
As more and more candidates take your hiring assessments, measure which results indicate the best hires. Then, as you collect more data, establish hiring rules within your desired range of test results to increase your chances of hiring salespeople with the highest success rate.
Metric #2: Iterate And Improve Sales Training
At most companies, sales training is limited to an initial orientation, which sets up even the best hires for eventual failure. Instead, your team needs both initial training and ongoing mentoring at both the group and individual levels.
Furthermore, you shouldn’t just be training your salespeople for today’s tasks, but rather, you should be developing them for long-term sales success.
However, determining the best mix of initial training and ongoing guidance isn’t always easy. That’s why you need metrics and feedback loops at every stage of training to inform you on how effective your training efforts have been. If a particular cohort of salespeople has been underperforming compared to other salespeople, your metrics should be able to pinpoint exactly which aspects of their sales training fell through.
Metric #3: Don’t Let Your Sales Database Go Dormant
One of your company’s biggest revenue-generating assets (besides your sales team) is your extensive database of leads and prospects who haven’t bought from you yet. You need to start leveraging this information for all it’s worth.
Start by multiplying your rate of contact with current leads in your database. Not only does this provide a steady influx of opportunities into your sales funnel, but it also ensures you’re not missing out on any potential revenue.
A solid metric to use in this case is to set a goal of contacting your entire sales database 2 times per year. By calling (and culling) through your sales database on a defined schedule, you clean out old contact information and unearth latent leads.
No matter whether you have an in-house or outsourced sales team, this single step of multiplying your contact rate with current prospects increases your chances of closing deals without requiring any new outbound prospecting.
While certain B2B sales metrics stand out and draw your attention, ensure you’re not overlooking the ones, such as a salesperson’s talk time and number of dials, that make the most difference in generating more leads and closing more deals. With the right metrics informing your decisions, your sales team is set up for success.
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This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: 3 Valuable B2B Sales Metrics You Might Be Overlooking
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