Sales Data Analysis & Reporting

Sales tracking - The secrets to setting Sales KPIs: linking activity to results with David McMurdo

Jonathan Hubbard
Jonathan Hubbard
March 1, 2024

If you’re using sales KPIs but aren’t getting sales results, or finding it impossible to get your team engaged with those KPIs or writing customer notes, read on.

Welcome to setting KPIs reps care about: with David McMurdo and Jonathan Hubbard. 

To help you create better sales KPIs, we had veteran sales coach and founder of McMurdo Consultants, David McMurdo, with us to discuss the KPIs you should avoid, the ones you should embrace, and how to create them. 

Complementing David’s teachings was a feature release demo for Numerik’s new KPI/posts feature given by our CEO Jonathan: unique rep-focussed features designed to make note-taking as fun and simple as possible. 

Scroll down to discover David and Jonathan’s top 5 takeaways, a full transcript with images, and the live-show recording.

The Secrets to Setting KPIs with David McMurdo

Sales KPIs Expert Q&A

If you’ve got any questions for David and Jonathan, you can reach them on LinkedIn at:

David’s Profile

Jonathan’s Profile

Key Takeaways for Sales Managers

Five key takeaways from David’s discussion on making better KPIs which drive success:

  1. To get the result we want, we need to ensure we're doing the right activities, and have the capability to do them: the Rack Model.
  1. To drive sales results, salespeople need to do enough of the right activities (Quantity of Effort), focus their efforts in the right areas (Focus of Effort), and ensure the work they're investing time into is high quality (Quality of Effort.)
  1. KPIs are enablers for our business strategy. They should clearly articulate the expected result and where those results are going to come from. They should help managers understand the quality of the sales team's activities, and be a base for coaching.
  1. KPIs shouldn't be based on pure numbers, they should align with the overall business strategy. Making KPI targets set around the type of customer you want to do business with, product category, a certain marketplace: ensure your KPIs have enough detail for your salespeople to focus their efforts in a high-quality area.
  1. Activity KPIs are the next step, where we define our target (e.g. overall sales meetings) and then add focus (e.g. sales meetings per category sector.) Find your overall number and put in the detail about where a salesperson has to focus to get there properly. For a proposal KPI, you'd want to add focus by ensuring the salesperson meets a conversion ratio goal- explained in the KPI.

Five key takeaways from Jonathan’s KPI/Posts feature Numerik demonstration:

  1. The purpose of Numerik's KPI/posts feature is to use social media-like workflow and capabilities to make note-taking and KPI tracking fun for reps, instead of a chore.
  1. Posts can contain photos, video, voice clips or plain text and will use reactions, comments, and sharing to let managers and other reps leave feedback on posts published into the team newsfeed to spark conversation. From a manager perspective, post interactions can be used as a coaching tool.
  1. Posts can be tagged by activity type (e.g. face to face meeting) and are stored against each customer, giving reps easy access to the complete post history for a customer when needed.
  1. Because reps can tag their posts by activity type, managers can set a KPI target for that tag, creating a KPI leaderboard which can be shared to the team. The leaderboard can be sorted by activity, and show rep's progress against another to stay on track to meet each KPI target.
  2. The new features will have a phased roll out starting the last week of May 2022. Two way sync of post notes into/from CRM/other systems will begin soon. Current users can get in touch with the customer success team to discuss roll out for the feature and get it set up.

Contents

Key timestamps:

0:25 - Connie’s Introduction

2:33 - David begins his discussion

3:03 - David’s background

5:38 - The Rack Model

6:55 - How do we get results?

8:23 - The Effort Model

9:44 - What are KPIs and what should they look like?

11:07 - The mistakes organizations make regarding KPIs

13:50 - Using activity KPIs

16:02 - David finishes his discussion

16:26 - Jonathan begins his demonstration

18:06 - How Numerik works (targets)

20:26 - How Numerik works (leaderboards)

22:33 - Why we’ve introduced KPI/posts

25:00 - What can posts do?

31:57 - David adds insight (rep motivation to enter data)

32:43 - Jonathan’s response to David’s point

33:35 - Examples of posts your reps could create

34:45 - Introducing the KPI leaderboard

36:10 - Jonathan summarizes his demonstration

38:35 - Q & A session begins

39:07 - David answers the first question

41:25 - David gives his answer for the second question

42:40 - Jonathan gives his answer for the second question

44:05 - Connie gives David and Jonathan’s emails, and teases the next webinar in July

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