The Sales Insider

Driving performance requires accurate and focused measures of performance.  This is especially the case for account development and lead generation teams.  I have recently been interviewing both InsideSales.com customers and non-customers (predominantly from the B2B High Tech/Services/Telecom industries) to identify the optimal metric to use when measuring the success of account development reps.  I found that these companies are actually using a wide array of criteria that include talk time, dials per day, appointments set, appointments held, and opportunities set.

The most successful teams, however, are all using some variation of opportunities set.  Specifically, the most common metric I heard is called TQO, or Totally Qualified Opportunities.  A TQO is an opportunity that actually contributes to the sales pipeline and has a close ratio that is within the same ratio as the existing sales process.  This metric provided much greater visibility than any of the others I saw.

Then I dug into the number of TQOs that an account development rep can reasonably achieve in one month.  This number ranges from 16 to 28, and seems to vary due to differences in industry, maturity of rep, list type and source, and company/product brand.  The maturity level of reps ranged from young (20 year old non-experienced) to 45+ veteran reps.  Generally speaking, reps in the companies I talked to were calling on Jigsaw-, ZoomInfo-, or InsideView-type cold lists.

The next metric I looked at were the metrics measuring reps’ effort.  These were also extremely varied, although I did find an interesting pattern.  Companies that sell higher ticket items (valued at $100k or more) tend to have fewer dials per day (between 75 and 100 dials per rep) and spend more than 50% of their time researching the companies they are calling.  In contrast, I found that reps in companies with lower cost items typically dialed twice as much—between 150 and 200 dials per day—and spent much less time researching.

So, in evaluating your own team, consider focusing on 20–24 monthly TQOs per rep as your primary success criteria.  Additionally, depending on your average revenue per customer, set the expectation that your reps achieve 100–200 dials per day, where they spend the rest of their time researching, networking and connecting with the people they are calling.

Loved a recent post by the self-proclaimed “A Sales Guy” talking about the fact that when a sale focuses on price, it’s because the relative value surrounding the price has no context.

Take, for example, two salmon fillets, one $6.00 a pound, one $9.50. Same size, same weight. All things being equal, you take the cheaper of the two, right?

But what if the $6.00 / pound fillet was raised in a fish farm with 10,000 other salmon and artificially enhanced—and the $9.50 / pound fillet is freshly caught, true Alaska Salmon?

The context controls the value here.

As “A Sales Guy” states, “There’s no good or bad price by itself. Price is a reflection of everything around it.”

Prospects move to price negotiation almost immediately because they know it’s the one thing they can control now. They don’t have to wait for a “proof of concept,” they don’t have to wait and see if the implementation is going to go smoothly, they don’t have to look at the inevitable workflow, personnel, and management changes that a major purchase is going to require of them. Most of the time, prospects negotiate on price because it’s the easiest way to mitigate the inevitable costs they know they’re going to pay on the back end.

If you can show the prospect the value on the back end, prove how front and back align, discussions of price slip into the background relatively quickly. Not that the cost element ever completely goes away, only that it takes a back seat to achieving the value they’ve just discovered through the quality, strategic insights you’ve already provided.