As CEO, What Should I Watch in Sales?

This is what I tracked when I sold cars.

  • Number of people I helped.
  • Number of people I test drove.
  • Number of people I wrote up.
  • Number of people I sold.

Keep in mind, as a sales person at the dealership, we didn’t have to worry about marketing. That was covered by the franchise and corporate through newspaper ads, internet ads, commercials, radio ads, corporate ads, etc. As sales people, we just tracked exactly what we did on an individual level.

When I ran a b2b call center, I slightly modified some of those data points to a more relevant set of data points. However, I made sure everyone kept logs. In the digital age, that is quite easy to do with tracking software. CRM systems such as salesforce allows you to spool data based on specific data points as well.

Your sales manager should be keeping track of these digits on their individual teams. Your sales director should keep track of these numbers on their district. Your VP of sales should keep track of these numbers on a national scale. If you have a global business, your President should keep track of these numbers on a global level.

Each sales manager should be able to analyze the data to see where each sales person is weak and needs improvement. They should then train and focus on helping their sales people on how to improve that particular statistic, so the rest increase as well.

As a CEO, your duty is to analyze all the data to see what areas are weak and implement a strategy to improve their results.

  • Is selling in China harder than the US?

Maybe the content isn’t translated properly or the marketing material is weak.

  • Is the Midwest doing worse than the Coasts?

Maybe you need a portion of your team rebrand their message or reassess your marketing avenues.

  • Are new people struggling to meet the same results as veterans within a few months at a global level?

Maybe your training program needs work.

  • Is it just in individual regions?

Maybe you need to change out managers.

  • Is your whole company having trouble converting phone calls into leads?

Maybe they need additional tools to get their foot in the door.

Your job is to figure out what problems your income generating team is having and figuring out the best solution necessary to help them hit the target figures you have set on their department.

Depending on the size of the company, you can use this information to scale your personal involvement accordingly.

Originally posted on Quora.

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