The Benefits of an Activity-Based Selling Strategy
As a salesperson, there is only so much you can actually control.
You can’t control the amount of budget your customer has available. You can’t directly control the amount of time it takes for your contract to make it through legal review. You can’t control whether or not your competitor is chasing after the same prospect.
But here’s what you and your sales team can control: sales activities.
You can control how many calls you and your team make. You can control how many emails you send. You can control how many meetings you set. And all of those things – those activities – lead to hitting the revenue goals and business objectives you want.
In order to reach your business goals, you and your team need to focus on the activities that lead to success. But how can you be sure the activities you focus on are the right ones?
By following the data.
Activity Tracking for Sales Management
Following the data means tracking activities. It’s as simple as that.
Activity tracking is critical for sales management because it gives you visibility into what your team is doing on a daily basis, providing data you can analyze to understand which sales activities are most effective.
If your team is having trouble hitting their quarterly revenue goals, but you don’t actually know what it is they’re doing each day, how can you expect to pinpoint the issue and fix it? You need to know what activities your team is performing and how often they’re performing them.
Then, look at which team members are consistently hitting their quarterly goals and compare them to those who have the lowest performance. The difference in activity between the two groups is where you’ll find the key to making your goals.
There are a few specific ways that tracking activities can benefit your organization:
- Helps sales leaders identify problems and course-correct in real-time
- Provides insights into behaviors that lead to success for high performers
- Puts the focus on things that sales reps have control over & can directly influence
Identify Problems and Course-Correct in Real Time
Activity tracking allows you to pinpoint the root of any problems in performance. If your team isn’t on track to meet their goals, you can look at their activities to see where the struggle is originating from.
This means you can course-correct sooner if challenges arise, rather than waiting until the end of the month or quarter to find out that your team is not going to make its revenue goals. You’ll know what to coach your reps on, and be able to visualize how they improve as coaching sessions progress.
Tip: Better coaching starts with consistency and accountability. LevelEleven’s coaching solution can help.
Gain Insight into Behaviors that Lead to Success
Comparing the activities of your top performers to the activities of the low performers is an easy way to uncover what activities are resulting in success. Plus, once identified, you can coach the low performers on these successful activities.
Use your activity data to identify top performers for each activity in your sales process. Observe their specific behaviors for each and uncover what they are doing better than the rest of your reps.
With these insights, you can develop a coaching strategy for any team members who are not high performers. Take the best practices from your top performers and turn them into repeatable processes for the rest of your team.
Tip: It’s much easier to keep track of reps’ activities with scorecards that visualize the data, rather than reports and spreadsheets that just list hundreds of data points without context.
Focus on What Sales Reps Have Control Over
Tracking sales activities gives you a roadmap to successfully hitting your goals.
Once you identify the activities that are making certain team members successful (and the ones that are leading to problems), you can direct your team’s focus to what they can control. Rather than vaguely instructing your reps to “get new customers,” coach them on the activities that you’ve identified as leading to new customers.
Apply the insights you’ve gained from tracking the activities of high vs. low performers to give your reps explicit guidance on how to get more customers. Focus on the activities that lead to meeting your goal for new customers, starting from the very foundation with how many calls they have to make or meetings they have to set.
Not only is it helpful with your established team, outlining successful activities helps onboard new sales reps faster. Reps know what they need to do to hit their goals by the time they’re fully ramped, and managers know what behaviors to coach them on as they progress.
Tip: With LevelEleven’s Conversion Insights, there’s no more guesswork to determine how much of each activity you need to get the business outcomes you want.
Revenue as the Result of Sales Activities
Effective sales leaders recognize that revenue is a result of sales activities, and understand the cause-and-effect relationship between the two. This understanding is the foundation of activity-based selling: managing sales reps around the activities that lead to sales.
This strategy is effective because it focuses on the leading indicators that a sales team can make a direct impact on: number of calls made, emails sent, meetings booked, etc.
With these leading indicators, you can make adjustments in real-time to ensure you and your team are on track to hit your goals in the future.
