I thought that would grab your attention.  No, High Tech Start-Up life has not driven me to the psychiatrist’s couch… I’m talking about a physical therapist.  My neck seized up a couple of months ago, leaving me in pain pretty much all the time.  Not sure how it happened, maybe too many hours hunched over my laptop on VX12 in seat 23B.

Anyway… after a quick check with the doctor, I was shuttled off to a physical therapist where I expected to get some relief.  Not so fast!  As I sat there in agony for an hour, the therapist methodically took range-of-motion measurements, asked me a bunch of questions then sent me home.  I was still in pain, no relief and more than a little frustrated.  What’s up with that?

I didn’t appreciate this at the time but with her knowledge of mobility benchmarks and my baseline measurements, she would actually get me back to normal in half the expected time.  Just like my physical therapist, Sales Managers who work through the pain to establish Baseline Sales Measurements and build a reliable Sales Benchmark have an enormous advantage over their peers.

Highlights…

1. Establish Baseline Sales Measurements

2. Select Your Sales Benchmark

3. Instrument Your Sales Process

—————

1. Establish Baseline Sales Measurements

My first session with the physical therapist seemed like an eternity!  I’m expecting a a neck massage and she’s got the protractor out measuring how far I can move in every direction before the pain becomes unbearable – ouch!

When making a change to your Sales Process, take the time to collect baseline measurements.  Let’s say you’re managing a B2B technology Sales organization and your company has just come out with a new product.  This new product is popular amongst your existing customers but they are a risk-averse group and seem to require a ‘try before you buy’ experience.  After a lack luster quarter, you turn to your Salesforce.com administrator for a new Sales Stage – ‘Pilot’ and an adjustment to the Sales Playbook.  But if you stop here, you won’t be able to draw causal conclusions between changes in outcomes and the changes you just made to process.

Make sure you take Baseline Sales Measurements for deals including the new product on: selling time, days in stage, win rate and, several dimensions – by rep, by region, by market segment, etc.

2. Select Your Sales Benchmark

Towards the end of my first physical therapy session – when I’m sure there was nothing left to measure – we discussed goals.  She wanted to know what ‘good’ was for me but what I found out later was she was being guided by benchmarks.  I suggest that pain-free shoulder-checking while driving was a goal and she knew that a 40-something male in reasonable condition should be able to turn his head 80% to the left – the benchmark.

Sales Benchmarks give you a reliable place to aim.  Creating a benchmark is not difficult and there are several approaches, my favorite is the ‘Top Performer’ Sales Benchmark.  Why not measure how effectively your best Sales People are at introducing new products and how they improve over time as a group?  If you measure the Sales Team’s progress against the Top Performer Benchmark, you’ll send the message that average isn’t good enough.

3. Instrument Your Sales Process

After we got past the first session – measurements, goals, benchmarks and a treatment plan – each hour of physical therapy was broken down into three parts.  The first 5-minutes was measuring range-of-motion before we started, the next 50-minutes was the actual treatment then we finished up by re-measuring range-of-motion.  She was instrumenting her process to capture long-term changes in the pretreatment measurements and short-term changes in the post-treatment measurements.

You’ve made the Sales Process change, selected a Sales Benchmark, now it’s time to make sure your sales process is instrumented to give you the right signals.  Have your Salesforce.com Admin layer in email alerts to tell the Sales Team if they are converging on (or diverging from) the Top Performer Benchmark as things evolve week-to-week.  Without these alerts, you won’t be able to follow the data trail and all the stuff you’ve just done will have been a waste of time.

Result – Take Command Over Your Business

By establishing a baseline, determining a benchmark and instrumenting the process, my neck was back to 100% in 50% of the time – something I’ll never forget.

If you’re making an important change to your Sales Process, establishing Baseline Sales Measurements, selecting a Sales Benchmark and instrumenting the process will set you up to accelerate your own success.  Of course, once you’ve got visibility to the right Sales Effectiveness signals, you’ll need to take quick decisive action to stay-the-course when something’s working and course-correct when it’s not.  Just remember that, ‘he who aims at nothing will surely hit it.’

This article is part of the Sales Pipeline Management Mastery.

Want me to update you when I post the next article?  Subscribe to weekly email updates.

–Swayne