Improve Revenue with the most crucial KPI of Sales – “Meetings”

The internal meetings within an organization are likely to be well documented. They attended by the key players and are sure to be well recorded, along with their results and conclusions derived.

However, several organizations fail to upkeep any sort of a record of the sales meetings that take place beyond an organization’s premises. Even while this is not believed to be important, keeping a record for these meetings helps an organization at many levels. This helps with rewarding talent, hiring the right sort of resources, and business-critical decision-making.

Is your organization equipped with tools to track sales meetings? Maintaining data for the day-to-day activities helps to keep them organized. In sales, meetings with prospects are very crucial KPI which can be used to

(a) Plan: Figure out productive resources using the meeting-related data

(b) Set target: E.g., create a benchmark for the number of meetings that should take place every day based on historic data

(c) Beat target: Encourage salespersons to exceed their targets by exemplifying the value of meeting

Implementing a system to track all your meetings is an important way that brings value and success to an organization while yielding a competitive edge. The best time to start is now.

Let us take a look at a few of the top ways in which data pertaining to client meetings should be tracked, and how it delivers value for an organization:

1. Meetings Trends – Weekly / Monthly

An organization should maintain a record of the number of meetings that its sales team undertakes each month. A simple graphical chart can help an organization be surer of this aspect.

With the system in place, the number of meetings will increase as the sales managers will become more accountable. They can also put their focus on the marketing techniques that induce more meetings.

Just as an example, many marketing activities are at the disposal of marketing managers. Salespersons can distribute pamphlets standing outside a mall. Or the organization may choose to give out a few newspaper ads.

Each of these marketing methods will help generate new leads. But an organization should be sure of how many leads were they able to generate/how many meetings took place during the phase.

This way, by using historical data, an organization will be sure about the methods of marketing that work for them. Alternately, they can derive information about the marketing methods that work at a particular time of the year, or the marketing methods that work in a geographical location.

Such information at the fingertips will empower an organization with sound business-critical decision making and strategy making, such as the number of salespersons who should be involved with the field-work.

2. Meetings on Favorable day of the week

For each unique use case that we consider, a few of the days of the week are more conducive for holding meetings and deliver a higher proportion of positive results.

Just as an instance, holiday trips are frequently booked on Thursdays and Fridays. Similarly, people prefer to conduct meetings for buying cars on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

The aforementioned is business-critical information that an organization should make the best of. They can organize the relevant meetings and events accordingly, based upon the historical data.

Multiple tracking tools are available to help you find a favorable day(s) of the week in your line of business

3. Purpose of the Meeting

An organization can also benefit by tracking the purpose of a meeting that takes place, and how many meetings of the type are conducted by each employee.

Just as an instance, sales meetings may be categorized in the following way:

• 1st Meeting: Introduction
• 2nd Meeting: Identifying the key decision-makers
• 3rd Meeting: Cost negotiation
• 4th Meeting: Implementation
• 5th Meeting: Training

Tracking the records for these meetings can help an organization in several ways. Just as an instance, if the 80% of meetings that a salesperson conducts are introduction meetings, it implies that he is lagging in the ability to convince the clients about your products and services, and needs more training.

Tracking these meetings yield several important insights. Just as an instance, if an insurance company discovers that nearly 70% of their meetings are conducted for payment collection, then implementing an online payment gateway becomes a must for them.

Similarly, the implementation and training meetings are likely to be conducted by engineers and the prior meetings by salespersons. The volume of each type of meeting in contemporary data will deliver insights for a company regarding how many resources of each type – engineers and salespersons they need to hire.

5. Average meetings per person

Average meeting per person may be represented in the format of a bar graph for all salespeople. The vertical bars represent the number of meetings that a salesperson conducts in a year.

Here, the horizontal blue line is the average of the meetings that the salespeople conduct in a year. This line is useful for demarking the high performers, average performers, and underperformers.

In this case, the high performers may be appraised or promoted, such that their high performers may benefit the company to the maximum. Similarly, low performers can benefit from some motivation and training.

6. Sales Stages

Sales stages track the status of each potential consumer, based upon the sales stage where he is placed. This helps define the customers over which more energy and resources should be focused.

Using the information delivered by sales stages helps make a presumption of the closing time and helps define the schedule for the future accordingly.
Sales stages can be defined through an analysis of the meetings. Just as an instance, a client may be in the introduction stage, the price negotiation stage, or the implementation stage.

Different products have different sales cycles. Just as an instance, when one buys a pen drive, it’s a 3-day sales cycle. One sees the pen drive and buys it. Similarly, investing in residential real estate is likely to be a 6-month sales cycle.

When an organization has historic information regarding sales cycles, it is empowered to make meticulous business-critical decisions for the future and plans accordingly.

Let us consider an example that defines the value of tracking sales cycles. Suppose that a salesperson has sufficient time to invest over only one of the two customers, A and B.

Here, A wants 10 computers and is in the negotiation stage, while B wants 7 computers and is in the introduction stage. By tracking the sales cycle, the salesperson can decide that he wants to focus his energies over A.

Few more examples of similar reports could be:

– Meetings for eventful months of the year

A business may discover that their sales peak during Diwali. This phase may yield higher ROIs.

– Meeting for active hours during the day

People may want cheque collectors to meet them during the evenings, or they may be more willing to change telephone subscriber plans during the morning hours.

– Meeting for meeting duration

By tracking a salesperson’s average meeting duration, an organization can get clues about whether his performance is up to the mark.

Conclusion

Software for tracking the different metrics associated with sales meetings could benefit your organization in the finest of ways. In case you have suggestions for any such related metrics, contact us today at sales@astcrm.com