Helpful Metrics For Your CS And Sales Team
For a company to achieve its financial goals, management needs to manage their workforce effectively. However, with today’s sales cycle being longer than usual, reaching such goals can be rather challenging. Salespeople no longer have complete control of the market because they’re not the only ones who have access to service or product-related information. This information used to be the secret weapon these workers held when they went prospect hunting.
When salespeople have access to product and service-related information that no one else has, the outcome and success of their work is dependent primarily on their selling skills. When customers don’t have access to the same information sources, they can’t make independent educated decisions on the products or services being sold. This is when salespeople who are experts at their craft end up closing the sale.
How Does The Modern Sales Process Looks Like
In the past, the sales process began with prospecting, then contact initiation, followed by a prospect’s need qualification. After these steps, it moves to a service or product demo, then the handling of prospect objections, and then negotiations. If you complete these processes successfully, it usually ends in closing the sale.
The modern-day sales process, however, changed how salespeople interact with their sales prospects. Since buyers now have easy access to quality information about these products or services, doing research and making independent decisions on whether or not to buy is now possible. This empowered customers to make better and wiser choices without having to succumb to sales tactics that sales people employ.
In a study published by the Corporate Executive Board (CEB), customers complete 57% of the entire buying process before engaging with a salesperson. Additionally, Forrester also revealed that over 70% of B2B buyers spend 50% of their time doing research online before purchasing anything.
This radical change in how a sale is made poses a significant challenge to companies, but it also presents them with great opportunities. These changes push businesses to invest in their salespeople, that is, if they want to get a substantial slice of the sales pie.
If you want to maximize the earning potential of your business, you need to invest in your people. If you can’t find the best sales staff on your own, seek the help of agencies like SalesForce Search to do the hiring for you.
How Can Key Performance Indicators Help Businesses
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are just like goals and targets – they keep the individual, the business, and the organization on-track, highly functional, and efficient. These metrics help to objectively measure the performance of your CS personnel and salespeople. These KPIs should also be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART).
Salespeople and CS reps must hit their KPIs to ensure effective and efficient service delivery. The following KPIs are beneficial for sales and CS people to gauge the level of service and support they’re offering:
Lead Generation, Conversion, And Customer Retention
It all starts with prospecting. As your salesforce is busy generating new high-quality leads, your CS team should take care of your old and loyal customers. You can even utilize the latter to complement the efforts of the former.
Let’s suppose you intend to make this part of your metrics. How do you quantify such a KPI? One way of objectively measuring compliance is by counting the number of converted leads or repurchasing customers a specific salesperson or CS rep brings on board.
Troubleshooting Skills
This is the ability to identify customer issues and propose as well as initiate steps to resolve these concerns. To measure this KPI, you should check the number of resolved issues, satisfactory ratings, and dissatisfactory ratings each sale or CS rep gets monthly.
Sense Of Urgency
This is the ability of a sales and CS rep to prioritize a concern according to the severity of the issue and to propose timely resolutions. You can measure this KPI by checking the number of high-value clients and calls each salesperson and CSR can solve every month. Also, you should check the number of tickets each of them can resolve monthly.
Ability To De-Escalate
You can never completely avoid irate customers. Your sales and CS reps should know how to handle an irate customer’s concern at their level and to stop it from escalating. You can measure this KPI by counting the number of escalations each worker gets every month.
To ensure that they can handle such customers effectively, draft a guideline on how to professionally and systematically resolve various customer queries and concerns. Conduct training sessions among your staff and managers to ensure they know these steps and are ready to execute them.
Hiring The Best People
It’s indeed helpful to have a performance evaluation system within the company. You should set your quantifiable metrics in stone so that these can guide the people in the team appropriately. Remember, however, that these guidelines are useless and won’t matter much if you fail to invest time and effort in your hiring process.
If you hire the best people from the get-go, it’ll be easier to use these KPIs. If you have the right people in your team, these metrics will serve more as a guide for hitting goals rather than a checklist used to identify people you need to prune out.
