To those that know me well, I’m not making news when I confess my love for Salesforce.com. Add in metrics, reports and dashboards and we have a perfect weekday afternoon.
That being shared, I recently stumbled upon a recorded Dreamforce session on "Sales Prospecting Secrets: How Salesforce.com Fills the Funnel with Hot Leads." Needless to say, that’s right up my alley.
Since the full session clocks in at 52 minutes, I thought I'd share some of the highlights here. The first part of the talk is given by Erik Nierenberg,VP of Sales Business Development, and covers his outbound-focused team.
Point 1: Build Career Path into your Sales Roles
Salesforce.com breaks their Sales Development group into 2 roles: SRs and EBRs.
The SR team handles inbound lead qualification. These Reps are often straight out of college. This group serves as a training ground for future EBRs.
The EBR team (Enterprise Business Reps) is tasked with generating net new opportunities. These Reps are 3-5 years out of college and often former SRs. This group also serves as a training ground for future Account Executives (Reps closing business). Erik shares that the average tenure of EBRs is 12-18 months.
Takeaway:
If you are hiring Gen-Y Rep, you need to be ready to discuss career path – ready during the interview, ready at month 8, month 12 or month 14. Managers need to be prepared to answer “what’s next for me within this organization?”.
Point 2: Dashboards for more than Pipeline & Revenue
Erik shares that for Senior Management, pipeline and revenue metrics are all that matter. His Managers, however, need more detail to manage their groups day-to-day – at right is a screenshot of their Key Metrics Dashboard.
The left column reports on “Connects by Rep.” Most interesting is that they a) use colors and b) stack rank the Reps (best producers at the top) – to turn the dashboard into a Hall of Fame / Wall of Shame.
Similarly, the top chart in the center column reports on “Opps created this Month by Rep.” Again they use stack ranking with best performers on the left tapering down and to the right.
The beauty of this style of dashboard is that:
- Directors can use the same layout/format to evaluate not only individual Reps, but the Managers as well
- Managers get real-time insight into the weekly and monthly metrics that will eventually deliver qualified pipeline
- Reps can see exactly where they stand and, perhaps, can reach out to the best producing Reps to learn what’s working for them
Point 3: Let Reps Build & Share their own Dashboards
Erik shares how each of his Reps creates their own dashboard and shares it with their Manager. The dashboard is their view into how they will manage, prioritize & execute their territory strategy.
What I love about this approach is that it flips the traditional paradigm of day-to-day metrics & measurement on its head.
Rather than saying, “OK, New Rep. Here are the metrics I’m going to measure you against. This dashboard tells me how you’re doing.”
This approach is closer to:
“OK, New Rep. You know how you’ll ultimately been measured. What are the steps you will need to take on a daily and monthly basis to make your number? You tell me how you’ll measure yourself.
Better yet, show me. Build the dashboard that you’ll measure yourself against – and I’ll manage you to it.”
And better yet again “As a starting point, here’s the Dashboard that Vanessa (your new peer mentor) uses.
The money quote for me was “I’ve got 90 Reps running their own business – using our dashboard.”
Again there is a lot in the session worth considering. You can see the full 52 minutes here.
My recommendation is this – pick one of the 3 points offered above, take it to the Senior Executives in your organization and say “Here is a best practices we need to replicate. How do we get started?” Thanks for listening.
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