This is finishing week 19 onthe show, so glad that you’re here. If you haven’t already done it, pleasesubscribe iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. You can also find it on Sound cloud, Googleplay. You can find on the cutter consulting group.com website with transcripts.

If you’re on iTunes, pleasemake sure to rate the show, lever view. All of that helps people out there whenthey come across a show out of the 700,000 podcasts that are currentlyavailable, they see if this show would help them and their sales pig andhopefully hear from somebody else if this show is going to help them with theirsales professional career.

Now this week, if you’ve beenlistening to it, I have been covering sales technology, so what’s in your salestech stack and a lot of times, yes, when I bring up the subject with companies,with managers, with owners, it gets overwhelming.

There’s concern that moretechnology is just going to cloud the process and the system. It’s going toconfuse the wraps. There’s going to be more things that they’re not going towant to use. It’s just going to make sales worse and it’s going to makeeverything harder when the sales stack is done right.

When sales technology is rolledout correctly, it should be nothing more than a tool that helps the sales repsdo more, or the managers do more, or the company have more visibility overwhat’s going on with the health of the organization.

Technology as a whole shouldnot get in the way or make things worse for a sales person. Now, there may bethings that you have them do, a new process, a new technology they have tointeract with, which they’re going to resist.

They’re going to fight,they’re not going to like, and they’re gonna think it’s difficult ordetrimental for their whole sales process, but fundamentally, from a businessstandpoint, it’s only there to help them and make their life easier and helpthem close more deals, Andy, or help your managers manage them towards closingmore deals.

One of the hardest parts ofbeing a sales manager based on my experience and others that I’ve seen is whenyou’re managing a team and there’s so many things going on, there’s proactivegoal setting, looking at the numbers, listening to recordings, and there’sreactive on the floor, helping them close deals, overcome objections, you know,handling issues, personal issues, whatever that might be within the sales teamand a sales manager job is very difficult.

In today’s episode, what Iwant to talk about is that part of the tech stack [inaudible] doesn’t getdiscussed very often. [Inaudible] isn’t very sexy and there’s no one sizesolution for this.

However, it is important andwhat that is reporting and data and metrics, all of that is so vital to thehealth of the organization as they say. What isn’t measured isn’t managed, soif you’re not measuring it, how can you manage to it?

No. If you’re a salesorganization, if you’re a leader or an owner, then you’re going to say, I havereporting, I have the numbers, I have the metrics. But the key is do you, doyou actually have all of the numbers, the right numbers and at your fingertips?

I’m not talking about, hey,next I could get a report from somebody that could tell me what’s going on. Imean you could pull up a dashboard or a report in a few clicks to see thehealth of your sales team and what’s going on and all of your key performanceindicators, all of your KPIs that you have outlined.

It would lead to a successfuland profitable sales team. Here’s the thing, right? A lot of times there’s somany numbers available and if you’re not careful as an owner or even as a salesmanager, if you’re not careful, the numbers can be reported that make thingslook like they’re doing well, but in fact they’re not.

I know a lot of salesmanagers who will like to promote or push up the chain, various numbers likeclosing percentage or the actual number of units sold or new clients like that.Bottom line number, maybe the revenue, but the key is which of those numbersactually give the health of the organization.

Because saying you have agood closing percentage might not mean anything if the revenue per sale isreally low. So yes, you’re closing more sales, but if the revenue is low, itmight not outpace the cost per acquisition.

If your closing percentage islow, may be a lot of times sales managers might promote the number of salesthat are being done, but that’s outside the number of leads that are beingtaken in, which means your cost per acquisition could be unnecessarily high andyou may not even be aware of it.

Also, there may be times whena sales manager might promote the closing percentage or the sales being done assome top line figures. Well, without looking at the revenue of what’s beingdone. And so there’s a lot of sales where basically the store is being givenaway for the sake of closing percentage or the sake of closing numbers anddeals being done.

But what is the companygetting at the end of the day? And so you want to make sure that you have ahandle and a report right on all of the metrics that lead to a profitable salesteam and whatever that looks like. Now, what you want for your organizationthat’s going to be customized.

Obviously I could tell youall kinds of categories that matter, but really it’s the combination of thosemetrics of those KPIs for your team, and everyone’s going to be different, butthere’s some combination of all of those where you’re going to look at itbecause no single number will ever tell you how well your sales team is doing.

A lot of times owners may get a report from a sales manager of one of those metrics, like I covered [inaudible] try to make a decision, but it takes a combination of all of those data points and the intersection. So the closing percentage, the number of sales, the revenue, the cost per lead, cost per acquisition.

Also you want to look at thecancels because it’s one thing to close a lot of deals, but if you’re notwatching the cancels out the back end, then it doesn’t matter because you’relosing as many deals or you’re losing a percentage of the deals, which is thendriving up your costs and lowering your profits, so whatever you have in place,whatever system you’re using, make sure that you have some kind of reportinggoing on that gives you all of that as a snapshot and again, like I mentionedepisode, if you caught it, there’s many times in a sales organization you’restarting out with spreadsheets.

There’s nothing wrong withspreadsheets. When you’re starting out, you’re building your systems, you’rebuilding your process. If you have something that’s really good that solvessome problems that you’re selling, you know your product or service and youhave a solid sales structure, sales team in a sales system that they’re using,then start with spreadsheets. We’ve all been there, we’ve all started teams andcompanies on spreadsheets.

It’s nothing wrong with thatand you want to move your way up. Obviously you want to have things that aremore complex for your CRM, for your data points, but I’ll tell you based on myexperience, there’s always going to be some level of having to do somereporting within the system or maybe externally because let’s say you havesalesforce, let’s say you have RingCentral.

Sometimes they communicate,sometimes they don’t, and then you’re going to have to look at the health ofthose numbers on maybe a spreadsheet where you compile it together.

If you’re using our CRM, makesure that you have reporting on all of it. If you’re an owner of a company,make sure you know what’s important and what the intersection of those salesdata, what that sales metrics look like that give the health of yourorganization.

I can’t stress that enough.I’ve seen so many owners being sold by their sales manager on what’s important andwhat’s not important or what to look at and go look over here because the salesmanager knows they want in one category, but they’re not winning in another andthey don’t want to be held accountable or they don’t want to get in trouble.

So make sure you’re lookingat that and if you’re not sure what you should be looking at, please reach outto me [email protected] or you can find me on LinkedIn. Justsearch Jason Cutter and we can chat, set up a time to talk and I can at leastpoint you in the right direction and give you some advice on the metrics thatmakes sense for your organization because there’s some that are key, right?

Like closing percentagenumber of leads that are being taken, the cost per leads, cost per acquisition,the number of sales, the revenue that cancels, but there’s going to be aspecific formula for your organization. I hope that helps. Thank you again forlistening.

I appreciate the fact that ifyou downloaded this, you’re listening to this episode, you care about yoursales organization, the sales experience that your reps are giving, and whatyou’re providing for them, as well as the sales experience that your customersare having and how they’re being converted from prospects to customers, toraving fans based on the sales experience you’ve built and the type of cultureyou have in your place.

That’s it for this episode.That concludes sales tech week, and as

Always, remember thateverything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.

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