I am a hapless AFL Richmond supporter. Many weekends I cannot bear to turn to the sports pages to read the obituary. When the Tigers do crack it for a win (even a draw is cause for celebration for Richmond fans), I can’t wait to rip the wrapper off the Sunday paper to digest the commentary and all the stats. In fact, I Iove reading the stats table more than the bloated summaries from the ‘editorial experts’. Do you know the sorts of tables I mean? They detail just about every sort of stat for every player. Not only the basics like kicks, marks, handballs, goals and points, but the really interesting stuff as well – hard ball gets, inside 50’s, tackles for and against, contested vs uncontested marks – to name just a few. This basically tells me which critical actions contributed to the win, which players were serviceable, and which players were passengers. I bet the coaching staff use these stats to drive individual player performance, improvement and training programs. No wonder the players feel so transparent – they are held accountable!
Imagine if your company could replicate this sort of scientific measurement for performance management. Well you don’t have to imagine. Leading organisations are already doing it, and gaining spectacular sales growth as a result.
For Sales, the key is finding a way to measure sales visits in a way that scientifically shows the targeted sale rate, as well as the qualitative value of each meeting. This should be done for each member of the Executive Sales team, on an even playing field, where performance is listed from the top to the bottom, just like the sports-league tables the papers construct. The trick is to be able to link these measurements to the outputs the team is focused on delivering. For each team member the table should show the number of prospects converted to customers, and the number of customers converted to preferred supplier status. Then you need to link these output measures to financial outcomes, i.e. sales growth performance, sales performance to budget, and so on. In other words, an integrated league table, or Sales Scoreboard, for the whole sales team that shows visit/activity inputs, sales process outputs, sales financial outcomes.
