M Is for Metrics: Sharing Metrics Will Accelerate Growth

Although a lot of the sales process is about fostering relationships and building your champion within the business, Metrics, or numbers, form the foundation of any sales process. 

Metrics/numbers/statistics provide highly persuasive arguments for humans on whether to act. Persuasive also for our own organisations to justify resources, and critically, important to our customers to justify a business case for change.

And we need to collect a lot of them.

It’s easy to think that when talking about metrics, we are just interested in qualifying the pain the customer is facing, whilst demonstrating how our solution helps. These metrics are clearly critical, and will form an integral part of the business case that is compiled for every procurement for every business, but how do you know which company to target in the first place?

If your solution is best suited to a company with over a thousand employees, it doesn’t make much sense to spend time and resources targeting a company with a few hundred on the payroll. Sounds obvious, but only if this metric has been logged in some collaboration tool that the lead generation team has knowledge of, and access to. 

There are many other metrics that should feature in any sales collaboration, and they will differ for each company, but the collaboration of maturing these metrics is key.

However, many organisations fail to understand the importance of teams;

• knowing these numbers
• understanding what good looks like
• collating them
• sharing them
• ensuring the whole go-to-market has access to them

SHARING IS CARING ACCELERATING GROWTH

As metrics are important at nearly every stage of the sales process, albeit for different reasons and for different audiences, this information needs to be accessible to everyone, always.

If go-to-market teams are keeping information siloed within the various teams, these teams are missing out on vital information from each other. 

• Marketing may miss metrics to entice customers to become an MQL.
• BDRs may miss metrics to persuade a customer of the need for a meeting.
• Sales may miss key metrics and use cases to justify an ROI.

The Metrics document should be accessible to EVERYONE within any go-to-market organisation - marketing, business development, sales, presales, services, customer success etc. 

So here are a few tips on how to get started:

• Create a collaboration space - document, chat, portal etc
• Make sure everyone knows about it
• Make sure it is easily accessed and regularly reviewed 
• Make sure it is kept updated and relevant as your business grows
• Ensure your team is ‘audible ready’ and can share the metrics and the backstory with customers

Now, although every deal is different, every deal is also largely the same. By having a series of metrics telling you which type of company your solution is best suited to, you’ll be solving a lot of the same problems in these different organisations.

• Every time you identify a pain within a target organisation, log it. 
• Every time you demonstrate the efficacy of your solution in a business case, measure it and log it. 
• Every time you identify how your solution beats a competitor, measure your positive impact and log it. 
• Every time you deliver a solution for a customer, measure the outcome and log it.

ACCELERATE ONBOARDING WITH METRICS

Numbers tell stories which can accelerate onboarding for sales to ramp your new recruits faster. Using those metrics, collected, a story can be told, which sales teams can learn to quickly establish credibility for new team members with customers.

Faster credibility will ultimately increase the productivity of your sales team members, accelerating them to the milestone of closing deals.

It’s not only about credibility for new recruits, it’s also about having team members working on the RIGHT DEALS FIRST TIME.

Metrics are the bread and butter of the qualification of pipeline; it’s how you identify whether a deal is worth pursuing in the first place, how you qualify the identified pain (and importance to the customer), how customers justify the customer spend and more.

METRICS ARE IMPERATIVE FOR ALL DEPARTMENTS

All departments rely on metrics. It’s not just about sales.

• Marketing creates more persuasive case studies using metrics.
• Pre-sales use metrics to qualify the most important use cases.
• Customer Success measures adoption & business case delivery using metrics.

And those departments will have useful metrics to share with sales too. 

Again, collaboration is needed across all departments. By creating time and space for collaboration, you will accelerate the onboarding of every subsequent hire and therefore grow your team and productivity at a faster rate.

So take some time to consider – how are you collecting and collaborating on the numbers which will establish your credibility and faster deliver growth?

If you are interested in new ideas, inspir’em sales meeting exercises and lesson plans are available to continue the development journey of your teams.

Contact us today to further boost your sales and see your revenue grow.

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