Do the goal setting and related measurement processes drive critical activities?
Most organisations set sales targets for product sales and referrals in branches and contact centres. However, when it comes to measuring and tracking against targets best practice is much less frequent. Like many others, this organisation focused its measures principally on completed sales. Like most others too much was being tracked. League tables encouraged heavy emphasis on who did the most business last period. As a result, too little attention was paid to the more meaningful pipeline measures (enquiries, initial interviews, completed applications etc.) and the interrelated ratios which predict future sales volumes. Reports were redesigned and simplified. Sales managers were encouraged to focus much further upstream, diagnose leakage points and concentrate investigation and coaching time on the individual sales issues of each of their units. There is still a long way to go but true sales measurement (and related management) is now much more common.
