Catching Your Balance
When you stumble, being able to right yourself depends on having a sense of balance. The fluid in your inner ear needs to stay level. When it’s not, your brain recognizes that you are falling. And if you don’t act fast, you’ll hit the ground. All day long we pick up information from our inner ear and our nerve endings that tell us when we’re engaging in something that will harm us. Conversely, we receive messages of pleasure from things that we need to do in order to stay healthy.
In the body of your sales organization, it is just as important to heed information about which practices make your company more healthy and which practices will do it harm. When the sales numbers come in, and it becomes clear that Salesperson B isn’t pulling his weight for the second month in a row, it’s easy to see that some kind of change has to be made. If your lead generation, or lead buying efforts are falling flat, you can’t continue trying the same thing and expecting different results.
Making these type of decisions is probably the easy part of managing your sales team and your marketing spend. Once you have the information about what works and what doesn’t, it’s practically an automatic response to cut the dead weight; an automatic response like catching your balance when you start to stumble. Quickly and accurately collecting and analyzing performance data is a bigger challenge.
Because unless you’re seeing information in real time about the performance of your sales agents and your lead sources, you can’t make adjustments in real time. The ability to make an immediate course correction belongs to those who can see up to the minute information on where their sales and marketing machine is underperforming. Lead management software gives you actionable insights around your employee and campaign performance.
Managing a sales team without lead management software is choosing to make business decisions with incomplete information. Know what works and manage to win by using lead management software.
