Metrics to measure and control the performance of Sales department

The salespeople and company sales force are those who actually generate your income dollars. Sure, it's important to have a good product, support which can respond fast, pretty design and make people write about your company in magazines, but still the most important part is to get the resulted leads converted into actual dollars.

It's quite easy to organize the sales department. For instance, you can hire someone who have experience in managing this kind of department in other company. He or she will hire a team of sales professionals and they will generate some revenue for your business.

The problem is that these people will usually use some principles they already know and the problem is that these ideas worked yesterday, but might not work today and will break your business tomorrow. It's important to have "live" sales department, which will grow with your company, which will tech itself, which will cost every dollar you invest into the sales process.

So, I'm going to discuss some ideas, which will help to improve any sales department at any company.

First, controlling business is about measuring business performance. So, it is important to identify what aspects of sales should be measurable. The answer is: all important! There must be some key performance indicators. For sales department these might be "cost of sale" and "sale per employee of sales department". These two indicators will determine the rules of the game. If you sell luxury things, then you will be able to hire best professionals and pay a lot, but if you are running small store, then it would be wiser to invest more in education of your stuff.

What are your biggest investment in business? I'm sure you have to pay much for rented space, then make sure you are using this space efficiently. Check the profit you have per space square foot. Sounds simple, but you will know much more if you have these answers.

Second, I'm sure you know about how it is important to listen to your customers, but if you actually hear them? It's a good idea to run a separate department to analyze customers' opinion, but it is also important to gather information from wherever you can. So, make sure there are customer-related process in your Sales department, which allows you to get feedback from prospects. If it works? I have a good indicator: if you can hear complains and negative feedback (I hope not very often), that it really works.

Third, measure your sales team. Make sure it works properly. Make sure you know the average (also worth and best) conversion rate for salespersons. I'm sure you will wish to find out who is running better than others and share his experience. Make sure your salespersons know about all features of your CRM system and use them actively.

Finally, the best businesses know how it is important to train stuff regularly. Nowadays its also popular coaching and mentoring, but it doesn't matter how you do name it - just make sure your sale stuff is educated and trained well. Make sure that they know about product a lot or better you it themselves.

It's really important to measure and control the performance of Sales department, but the most important is that you can have results of your changes almost immediately, so keep measuring, controlling and benchmarking your sales.