5 Signs You're Headed for a Sales Slump

Every competent salesperson dreads a slump, but even if you’re the kind of hunter who can sell ice to an Eskimo in December, you’ll find a time when even the Eskimos just aren’t buying. Want to keep your pipeline fat and flowing? Learn the signs a slump’s heading your way so you can stop it before it hits your pocketbook.

1. Your activities slow. Regardless whether or not a prospect comes to you or you go to them, activities are the gasoline that powers the engine of your pipeline. If you’re not doing anything, you won’t go anywhere. If you’re consistently underperforming on calls, meetings, and emails per day, even if you have plenty of prospects now, it’ll start hitting you later. When you aren’t hitting activity targets, what are you doing? You certainly aren’t selling.
   
   I often hear salespeople tell me that they would rather concentrate on quality activities than meeting a certain quantity of them. If you are one of these salespeople, let me ask you a question: Have you met your annual goal? If the answer is no, that bird don’t fly.
   
   Even if you believe some your activities aren’t ‘quality’ ones, the mere fact that you’re forcing yourself to do something means you aren’t leaving room for excuses. Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can fill your schedule hunting and pecking for just the right prospect. Pick up the phone and start making calls, not excuses.
    
2. Your lead conversions slip. In Salesforce, lead conversion is a great leading indicator of incoming opportunities. In my organization, I tend to rely more heavily on this data than on leads created because we require very few criteria to create a lead. For instance, a salesperson can put in a first name, last name, company name, and lead source to create a lead. Since there’s no email or phone number, that salesperson has no way to actually contact this lead. It’s basically a useless record until we have more ways to engage.
   
   Converted leads require contact information like a phone and email, so our sales team must perform due diligence to qualify a lead. If your company functions in a similar way, reach out to your Salesforce administrator to create a report or dashboard component that will track your conversions.
    
3. Your outbound prospects shrink. Outbound prospects are leads you generate beyond the marketing department’s efforts. Your company’s marketing team has a set budget for the year. They know that budget will generate X number of prospects for you. Your sales goal is likely X + Y number of prospects because most marketing departments don’t have the budget to carry 100% of the lead generation for a company. Don’t let the leads that come to you carry you, because by the fourth quarter you’ll be desperate for wins, and nobody buys from a desperate salesperson.
   
   So get out there and sell. Go to networking events, leverage your social networks to find customers. Write articles on LinkedIn like this one and share it. There are plenty of simple things you can do to generate leads. Trust me when I say you’ll need to do them.
    
4. Your opportunities age. Nobody likes losing a deal, but in sales it’s a fact of life. Sometimes you need to recognize that opportunity you’ve had open for six months is a goner. Why? You need a fresh pipeline so you know where to spend your time, and if you have old opportunities clogging your pipe, you won’t spend your valuable time concentrating on the deals you could win.
   
   By keeping your opportunity volume artificially high (not to mention keeping lost opportunities open also artificially inflates your closing ratio) you won’t feel the pressure to refill the top of your pipeline. You’ll start convincing yourself you need to do less when you should be doing the exact opposite.
    
5. You don’t know your KPIs. If you don’t know your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), it’s time to call your supervisor and have a talk. Your KPIs measure your performance. Your success (or failure) hinges on meeting the benchmarks your organization has set for you. You should know everything about them, from how many calls you need per month to your close ratio, knowing your performance is key to meeting and exceeding your goals. You can find your KPIs via Salesforce dashboards and reports. If you’re not using them, you’re selling in the dark, and that’s never a good place to be.

Memorize these warning signs. Leverage Salesforce to track them, and when you notice one, take action to turn things around before your pipeline dries up. At its core, a sales slump starts from within, not without. Recognize the signs and make a conscious effort to eliminate them. Once you do, you’ll find yourself back in the driver’s seat and busting past your goals.

For more Salesforce and CRM knowledge articles, don't forget to return to theforcefactory.com for the latest and greatest knowledge articles for everything Salesforce and Sales Ops related.

5 Tips To Make Your Sales Dashboard Shine

Dashboards drive behavior. If you don’t read another word in this article, at least remember that. From your sales reps to your senior executives, what they see in their dashboards will inform the decisions they make and the strategies they implement to achieve their objectives.

Many people confuse the real purpose of dashboards. You shouldn’t think of them as simply visual representations of your reports. Think of them as behavioral drivers, and if you’ve designed them correctly, they’ll guide, condition, and motivate your sales team to over perform.

First, how do you know your team’s actually using their dashboards? Ask your Salesforce administrator to check the last refresh date of each of their dashboards. If your team isn’t refreshing their data daily, your dashboard isn’t driving behavior or results. It’s that simple.

So how do you build a better dashboard?
Hopefully by now you’ve established some strong KPIs for your team. If not, I recommend a quick read on my Killer KPIs article to get a good handle on how they’re made. Once you have KPIs in hand, you can go about creating an effective dashboard for your sales team by following these five cardinal rules:

1. Make it their data, not yours. For a salesperson, a dashboard should get them where they need to be, not show them where they are. Build dashboards that promote action (call volume, meetings, progress to incremental goals, overdue tasks, upcoming events, etc.). Salespeople are inherently action oriented, so make what they see encourage more of what they do—sell!

2. Encourage competition. Salespeople are competitive by nature. They want to win at whatever they do. Don’t be afraid to rank them within their team via the dashboard to coax them to go beyond their minimum. Trust me: no salesperson you want on your team is happy at the bottom. Without competition, you run the risk of a sales team becoming comfortable with where they are instead of aiming for where you want them to be, or worse, they might get in a rut and start underperforming. That’s not good for them or for you.
    
3. Keep dashboards simple. Your sales team isn’t stupid, but most of them aren’t by nature analytical, and you probably want your team concentrating on selling rather than parsing data. Every metric on their dashboard should easily and immediately relate its key objective. If it doesn’t, rework the visual until it does.
    
4. Tell a story. Our brains prefer order over chaos. It just makes sense to us if we can put a narrative to something or fit it within a satisfying structure. The sales dashboard should do something similar for your team. For example, mirroring the dashboard to the structure of your sales cycle makes things easily understandable to that sales person. Or, you can categorize graphics into similar objects (leads, campaigns, opportunities, etc.), or by type (calls per day/week/month).
    
5. Socialize it. This is similar to encouraging competition but includes a broader audience. Socializing the dashboard by publishing it at regular intervals will make those metrics in the dashboard skyrocket. If a salesperson knows their performance will be read by senior executives or other departments, believe me when I say they’re going to work hard to make sure they’re meeting their minimums every time. Nobody wants to underperform on a dashboard the CEO reads every Monday morning.

Remember that the sales dashboard drives behavior less than it displays data. We can always pull more detailed, complex reporting in Salesforce to parse and analyze results. Dashboards should be a quick, simple means to drive action toward that measurable result. Follow the five steps above, and you’ll give your sales team the means to succeed every time.

For more Salesforce and CRM knowledge articles, don’t forget to come back to theforcefactory.com for the latest and greatest tips and tricks.

The Secret Formula for Killer Sales KPIs

You've probably heard of Key Performance Indicators, also known as KPIs. If you’ve spent any time in a sales organization, you’ve probably heard this term thrown around by sales managers, executives, and sales reps grumbling about how they have to meet them. In short, a KPI measures a particular type of performance. That could be an individual, an activity, or a company product or service your company sells. Every department in an organization uses KPIs in some form or fashion, and even though many of us don't like them, leveraging KPIs correctly will send your sales through the roof—but only if you use them right.

But what are sales KPIs and how as a salesperson can you use them to blow past your goals? It’s easy to Google examples, but without knowing why you need KPIs, you run the risk of implementing benchmarks that are either ineffective or actively undermine you and your company's actual goals. So before you dive into the web for someone else's KPIs, take a second to learn the formula for making them right for you.

1. Determine the company’s goal. When building a KPI, you should have a primary goal in mind. This isn’t your individual goal; this is the overall company goal that guides its strategy across all departments and informs its vision of the future. Everyone in your organization regardless of where they fall on the org chart should know this goal. This objective will guide the KPIs you need to be successful. Plus, it’s always smart to go into your performance reviews knowing exactly how you contributed to the company’s strategic vision, and this gets you there.
    
2. Identify your professional goals. Now that you’ve identified the “big” goal, define the benchmarks you need to achieve that help your company get there. You should know the who, what, where, why, when, and how of these goals:
   
   a.     Who contributes to this?
   b.     What is the outcome of this?
   c.     Where can I achieve this?
   d.     Why should I want this?
   e.     When should I achieve this?
   f.      How can I achieve this?
   
   
3. Build specific metrics from your goals. Once you know how you fit in the company’s overall vision, you can give context to the actions that lead to your goals. For a salesperson, that doesn’t necessarily mean revenue, especially if your compensation considers other factors beyond it. Here are a few examples:
   
   a.     Activities per day/week/month
   b.     Cost per client acquisition
   c.     Leads qualified per month
   d.     Closure ratio (Win rate %)
   e.     Volume of accounts signed or market share increase
   f.      Average subscription fee of new accounts
    
4. Structure your KPIs to mirror your pipeline. You have everything you need to create a solid set of KPIs, but don’t just go slapping a bunch of goals together and think you’re done. Consider everything you do in sales and how you achieve your goals. Likely, your day-to-day activities fall neatly into your pipeline's structure: You must prospect potential clients, convert leads into opportunities, and close business to earn commission. Where does revenue fall in this structure? At the very end! There’s so much more involved in driving performance before you get to revenue. It’s critical you don’t sacrifice the top of your pipeline for the bottom, otherwise you’ll never make the money you deserve to make.

You can build KPIs as complex or simple as you like, but just because a KPI is intricate doesn’t mean it’s more effective. The universe favors simple solutions, and it’s just easier for many of us to wrap our heads around a simple solution rather than a complex one. 

Here are a few examples of KPIs our sales team has created to get us to our goals. Would they work for you?

·      Most valuable lead source (by revenue and by volume)

·      New leads to monthly goal

·      Activities to lead conversion

·      Ratio of converted leads to open opportunities

·      Average activities per salesperson to won opportunities

·      Ratio of won vs. lost opportunities

·      Number of won opportunities to annual goal

·      Revenue of won opportunities to annual goal

·      Average annual recurring revenue per salesperson

·      Average monthly subscription fee per salesperson

Last but certainly not least keep one thing always in mind: KPIs aren’t written in stone. Sometimes, what we think works in theory falls flat in practice. Be smart about your KPIs. Revisit them often with your manager to make sure they’re driving you to your goals, and if they aren’t, work to find a solution that will.

KPIs do more than just give you metrics to succeed; they also demonstrate your value to the organization. If a KPI doesn’t work right, it might not present your value correctly (or at all), so it's critical to get them right. Revisit and rely on them, and you’ll set yourself up for success now and into the future.

For more Salesforce, CRM, and Sales Ops knowledge articles, don’t forget to come back to theforcefactory.com for the latest!

Make Your Prospects to Fall in Love with You Each and Every Time

Every competent sales and marketing professional out there knows the cornerstone to you and your company’s success is the relationship you build with your customer. Back in the day, we used to track this relationship via files, post-it-notes, scribbles on notepads, or complicated Excel spreadsheets that never truly made the data relatable or usable for anyone but your boss.

Luckily for us, the advent of software like Salesforce has completely transformed the way organizations manage relationships with prospects. But how do you, as a sales and marketing professional, best utilize a CRM solution to boost your sales?

It’s simply, really. You make Salesforce work for you. When deployed properly, Salesforce is a detailed touch-by-touch record of the relationships you have with your prospects.

First, if you haven’t yet, take some time to build a few customer profiles. You probably already have them in your head, but if you haven’t recorded them (or better yet built metrics in Salesforce to automatically flag which profile a prospect meets) you should do it now. The Whole Brain Blog said it best when they described what a customer profile should be:

Create profiles that describe specific segments of your current clients. Ensure that the profiles are tangible, so that you can envision this person and what would motivate them to find your business.

Describe your clients in written profiles, called personas. Create a specific persona for each identifiable client group and name them. Include images of ideal clients, either real or a hypothetical individual

It may seem like a silly exercise, but it will absolutely help you quickly categorize your prospects and determine the best strategy going forward. And because your close rate can drop dramatically the longer you take to respond to a lead, having a robust profile helps you respond quickly and with the solutions your prospect wants.

Now that you have your profiles you can really start using the power of data to boost your sales. If your CRM ties into marketing automation software like Pardot, you’ll have a detailed history of every interaction that has occurred between your company and your prospect. For instance, our sales team uses Pardot scoring to concentrate on highly-engaged prospects. They can look at the prospect’s activity and determine what pages on our website the prospect reads, what emails they open, what gets them to click through, and even what they searched to bring them to your site. That’s an immensely powerful tool to arm yourself with when you enter an opportunity, so if you don't have marketing automation, it's absolutely worth it to find one that works for you.

Lastly, don’t be afraid to build a relationship with your prospects via social networks. Now I certainly don’t suggest friend requesting them on Facebook or following them on Instagram, but as a sales professional building your network is key to building status in your industry, so don’t be afraid to reach out on LinkedIn or do a simple Google search to see how you can leverage their public persona to better your relationship.

So remember, if you want a prospect to fall in love with you, there are three things that’ll help you do it every time before you even meet face-to-face. Build comprehensive customer profiles, dive into your marketing data for valuable insights, and reach out and research in a professional, respectful manner.

For more Salesforce and CRM knowledge articles, don’t forget to come back to theforcefactory.com for the latest and greatest tips and tricks.

9 Salesforce Best Practices to Convert Your Leads to Cash

Many organizations struggle with lead nurturing and lead conversion. Large enterprises often have complex layers managing prospects as they transverse through your customer journey. Marketing handles the initial nurture, then inside sales takes control once the lead scores high enough (or meets enough criteria), and finally the account executives close the deal.

That's all well and good for large organizations with the resources to hire large staff, but what about small and medium sized companies? When you wear multiple hats in a leaner enterprise, what is the best way to handle a lead?

Three things you should Never do...

1. Don't email just for the sake of emailing. Your leads are people. Every day, they are bombarded both personally and at work with someone trying to sell them something. Be kind. Respect their time. Try to make your communications personal, but if that isn't something you can do with your resources, always offer your leads something of value in your message. If you don't have anything to say, don't hit send!
2. Don't focus on conversion volume. While the ultimate goal is to convert a lead into an opportunity, you want your sales team to focus on real opportunities. If your criteria for qualifying leads is too broad, your sales people will be juggling too many deals that aren't actually opportunities. You'll waste their time, your time, and drive down your close rates. Who wants that?
3. Don't ask for a lead's life story. In Salesforce, we can put literally hundreds of fields on a page layout, all juicy bits of data on a prospect that you can dive into, parse, and otherwise analyze until the cows come home. But there is such a thing as information overload. For one, the more you ask a prospect to enter, the less likely they are to engage. Keep required fields on lead forms to a minimum, and you'll get more leads overall. Second, swamping your page layouts with a ton of fields decreases usability for your actual users because they can't find the data they need to effectively nurture and convert their leads. Save the data capture for the opportunity when your prospect is willing to do business, or better yet, capture even more information once you have their business so you can start building powerful customer profiles.

And the things you should Always do...

1. Map out your process. This is incredibly important, but you might be surprised how many companies don't actually take the time to do this. Whenever you design a process, it's critical to actually visualize it first to understand its flow and function. It also creates a guideline for accurate reporting, flows, and data points when you're ready to implement. Without a visual framework, you'll find your lead process (or any process for that matter) becomes an unwieldy Frankenstein monster of quick fixes and patchwork updates.

2. Define your conversion criteria. Many organizations use BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline) for their conversion criteria, but for your business, maybe that doesn't quite work. Instead, ask yourself what exactly constitutes an opportunity for your company. For example in my organization, an opportunity is an official request for proposals. Once you've defined the entry point for an opportunity, now you can work back from there and create criteria your prospect must meet before that opportunity becomes active. In my example, we would also ask if that prospect has the authority to sigh a contract, if our offices can actually service them, and whether or not they have the budget to afford us.

3. Set a cadence. People are mostly creatures of habit, and you should be like most people. Be cognizant about what your customer wants. Are they looking for a deal and expect a daily email with products you have on sale? Is this a longer sales cycle and your prospects would send you to the junk folder if you emailed them more than once a week? Whatever your industry, set a cadence that's respectful in a way your customer expects.

4. Score leads for data integrity. Keeping your data clean is critical for building that relationship because a) dirty data makes your messaging miss the mark, and b) dirty data makes reporting useless. Create validation rules, required fields, pick lists, and other types of fields that drive your users to enter data cleanly. Your prospects will appreciate not seeing their names screamed at them in all caps and your bosses will appreciate the accurate reports. 

5. Score leads on their level of interest. Marketing automation software like Pardot scores leads on their level of interaction with you. You can assign point values to different levels of interaction, giving, say, 5 points to a lead who clicked on a page and 40 points to a lead who filled out a form. This level of lead scoring allows you to quickly report on prospects taking an active interest in your company and can empower your sales and marketing teams to take a more active approach with prospects who have higher scores.

6. Be patient. Sometimes, leads will zoom through the lead lifecycle straight into an opportunity, but many times, they won't. They'll linger in the lead stage until they meet the criteria you've defined. Be patient and consistent with your communications. Use analytics to measure the performance of your messaging and adjust accordingly to make sure you're achieving your industry average open and click through rates. On average, our organization attempts more than nine communications before a lead responds, so it's critical that we maintain our messaging so as not to lose business. Be patient. Be consistent. In the end, it pays.

These are just a few (but very critical) items to keep in mind as you build out your CRM lead process. For more helpful information about Salesforce and lead management, don't forget to regularly check www.theforcefactory.com for new articles and information.

Welcome to the Force Factory!

It's the inaugural post of the Force Factory blog. I thought I'd take a second to let you know just what exactly this blog is all about:

1. Salesforce.com. I'm a huge SFDC advocate and evangelizer. The Salesforce platform has fundamentally altered the way we do business and transformed the way we think about sales and service to our customers.
2. Sales Operations. Sales Ops is my wheelhouse, and I'm constantly looking at ways to improve how I serve my organization. While this blog's primary focus is SFDC, I'll spend some time posting information that's helped me better direct our sales team. This includes training, selling methodologies, proposal development, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and contract lifecycle management.
3. Data-driven Marketing. I use Hubspot, Pardot, and (hopefully) soon Marketing Cloud. Data in Salesforce is both a blessing and a curse. You have tons of it, now how do you read it? Where is the signal in the noise? Understanding the information in your database is critical to effectively growing your company, so I'll focus some of my time pursuing this topic.

What you won't see here are tons of coding. I'm a declarative programmer, meaning I spend most of my time building the infrastructure and defining procedures, flows, etc. within the existing framework and capabilities of SFDC. I don't do a ton of APEX or Visualforce coding, and to be honest, the Salesforce Success Communities have this roundly covered.

I hope you enjoy The Force Factory.

-A