5 Simple Metrics That Smart Sales Managers Track to Improve Their Numbers
As parents, we fuss over how many marks our children score. We want our children to keep improving their grades.
For this, we do many things. We instruct them to study longer hours, supervise their study time, take revisions of completed topics, track their scores, speak to their teachers, and so on.
We understand that for our children to achieve better scores, they must focus on certain activities that influence the results.
But when it comes to business, we do the opposite. We focus so deeply on the objectives that we forget to track activities that influence them.
Why We Obsess Over Results
There are three reasons.
One, many factors contribute to a business staying competitive. Increasing sales, streamlining operations, providing customer support, and so on. Tracking activities for all these factors become overwhelming. It’s easier to focus purely on outcomes, which is what leaders do.
Two, if we can do something faster than others, we like to do it ourselves. Hence, many leaders take action themselves in order to achieve the outcome faster rather than tracking people’s activities. [I also believe that the only reason why many parents track their children’s studies is that they cannot give the exams by themselves.]
The third is our obsession with short-term results. We want everything to get done as soon as possible, even if it means that problems will arise in the long run. “Tab ka tab dekha jaayega (we’ll see at that time),” we say.
The result is that sales managers are less in control of their sales numbers and more at the mercy of salespeople’s performance and luck. A business needs the luck to succeed, but too much dependence on luck is unhealthy. Don’t you agree?