Managing A Remote Sales Team Part 2

For nearly two decades, Gryphon has captured phone-based sales activity from some of the largest sales organizations worldwide. Through working with a variety of clients, Gryphon has found several key performance indicators that are truly predictive of success.

These KPIs include the total number of calls a rep makes, conversation conversion (contact-to-close), the call frequency (persistence) of the reps, and how many times they are reaching out to their leads before they are “exhausted.”

If you focus on understanding and improving these metrics, you will be amazed at how quickly it impacts your sales team’s effectiveness and your revenue.

Did You Know: The Aberdeen Group reports organizations that utilize sales enablement tools have cut sales cycles by 18%. Sales teams that use a sales intelligence solution with their CRM system have seen quota attainment increase by 36% or more!

Effects Measuring Key Metrics Has on Revenue

Let’s say you manage a team of 50 agents. Each agent is required to make 20 calls per day, per the 22 calling days per month. That’s a total of 440 calls a month. By tracking your team’s activity, you know it takes an average of 30 calls to set one appointment, so a single rep sets about 15 appointments on a monthly basis. If the rep has a 20% conversion rate, that’s three about closed appointments. If the average deal size is $1,500 then that rep’s average monthly revenue is $4,400.

Now, if half your team is making the required number of calls a month and converting at 20%, you have 73 closed deals a month with total monthly revenue of $110,000.

Once you have benchmarks in place and get a handle on the behaviors that are predictive of success, start to set goals for your team.

For example, let’s increase the contributing agents to 60% of your 50 agent teams and increase the required number of calls to 25 a day. If you have 10 agents just making five more calls a day, that would increase your monthly revenue by $55,000 per month to a total of $165,000!

Did You Know: 90% of all meaningful customer interacting happen over the phone? This despite the growth of social media and digital technology.

The Bottom Line on Top

Managing any sales team is challenging, regardless of whether everyone is under the same roof. To alleviate common inaccuracies associated with forecasting, managers need to help mold new hires into stand-up employees.

Sales leaders should constantly question the status quo and bring new tools to the table to help strengthen their team. It is important to challenge existing internal processes.

As a sales manager, it is essential to manage to an objective standard of activity performance that can be validated by actual calling data. By presenting a model of effectiveness based on rep behavior, managers can multiply desired outcomes, reduce bad behaviors and foster team collaboration ensuring that all team members are held accountable for their actions.

Did You Know: 33% of sales teams rate improving their use of sales technology as one of their most important sales objectives over the next 12-18 months?

If you would like to learn more, click here.