What if Everyone Followed Best Practices?

Today Dilbert takes a shot at so-called “best practices” that I thought was worth sharing.

While I do agree that it’s an overused term, we’ve seen an incredible desire from sales organizations of all sizes for the types of metrics that will help them accelerate revenue growth. As Gerhard Gschwandtner commented here:

“[sales managers] desperately want to understand how to squeeze productivity out of their sales force. They want to know how to hire the A players, how to compensate them, how to incentivize them, how to get them to adopt a better sales process, how to train them, how to measure their results, how to get them to forecast more accurately, and how to get them to adopt CRM technology.”

A few months ago I wrote a post on some of the best practices of sales analytics. It highlighted some of the metrics and reports that we showcase in our Analytics Gallery for Salesforce.com customers such as:

• Top 25 late stage opportunities for the quarter by rep and win rate
• Top 50 customers by total bookings and open pipeline
• Quarterly win rate by industry and region
• Product sales by lowest-performing sales reps
• Bookings by product, discount % by product, open pipeline by product
• Average Days to Close (win/loss), Average Deal Size
• % of the current period pipeline moved out to future periods
• % distribution for early stage versus late stage opportunities by region and by sales rep
• Deal size, discount, and quota attainment for seasoned versus new sales reps
• Avgerage Age of Open Opportunities
• Average Days to Close
• Avg. Deal Size (won/lost)
• Closed Revenue as % of Quota
• Opportunity Discount %

If you’re on the hunt for new and interesting key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you identify opportunities and threats in your sales pipeline, be sure to check out our Sales Analytics Gallery as well as consider subscribing to the KPI Libary blog. I’m confident that the result of implementing actionable metrics and KPIs won’t lead to sales mediocrity - regardless of what Dilbert has to say about “best practices.”

posted by Darren Cunningham at 7:02 am

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