Standards and Workflow
What do standards do for a sales organization? In their simplest implementation, they draw a line in the sand that says, if you can’t perform at least this well, you cannot work here. The most common standard is the quota. Quotas have been around forever, and they are effective, if a little unrefined. What the quota says is, “Just get yourself to this level of earning; I don’t care how you do it.” And this approach may get results, but it leaves quite a few things up to chance. When you are protecting or building your brand, it’s important make sure your reps are treating prospects well as measured by any number of factors.
The good news is it is possible to establish standards for sales reps that ensure that your leads are being handled in accordance with your company’s policies and proven best practices. With a lead management system you aren’t limited to being able to establish only sales quotas, but you can also establish and enforce standards around several other key metrics. For instance it is possible to establish standards around speed to contact. Make sure that leads are contacted within the first minute that they enter your system. If a rep is consistently unable to reach out to leads in a timely manner, it may be because their pipeline is experiencing a bottleneck. In such a case, the flow of leads will be automatically slowed to such a user.
Contact Rate, Qualification Rate, and Conversion Rate are three more metrics that are easy to track on the Leads360 dashboard. Establishing standards for sales reps at different stages throughout the sales process results in leads being consistently well managed by sales reps. Well managed leads not only mean a higher return on your marketing spend it helps you protect your brand and reputation as a provider of first class customer service.
