The ROI of Sales Activity Management

Research from Vantage Point Performance tells us that 83% of metrics being used by sales leaders are unmanageable.

It’s true. The vast majority of business numbers monitored by sales organizations are completely out of their control.

“Our criteria for managing became that a frontline sales manager could directly influence the metric by asking someone to do something differently and experience the desired change in the metric,” Vantage Point Partner Jason Jordan writes in the Harvard Business Review. “Our research confirmed our suspicion that some numbers just can’t be managed, no matter how hard sales leaders try.”

However, Vantage Point defined one type of metric that can be managed: sales activities. These are the steps that salespeople take to progress opportunities through the sales process, like making calls or crafting account plans.

The other types of metrics Vantage Point defined (sales objectives and business results) are still important. But those metrics are lagging indicators – a result of sales activities.

Here’s how Jason explains it: “If a sales force makes more sales calls (a sales activity), then it will probably acquire more new customers (a sales objective). If more customers are acquired, more sales will likely follow (a business result).”

If you want to achieve specific sales objectives and business results, you must manage the sales activities that precede them.

But research from Vantage Point shows that the current state of managing sales activities is inadequate.

Here are some statistics gathered by HubSpot:

• Only 33% of inside sales rep time is spent actively selling.
• 71% of sales reps say they spend too much time on data entry.
• Lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget costs companies at least $1 trillion a year.

So what’s the solution to our sales activity problem?

According to Salesforce, 56% of all sales leaders are using sales activity management software, and 19% plan to start using it in the next 12-18 months.

Sales activity management is a huge priority for sales leaders, and they’re seeing instant ROI from it. Check out the results these modern sales organizations saw after investing in sales activity management software.

With Sales Activity Management…

1. Procore increased their SDR-originated revenue by 55% and year-over-year new business pipeline by 400%.
2. Veritas experienced 130% more contacts created, 105% more proposals sent and 8 times more meetings scheduled.
3. Staples’ key selling activities increased by 182% (as part of this, they doubled their number of opportunities created).
4. HubSpot saw a 35% increase in the right sales activities and a 31% increase in qualified prospect meetings.
5. Paycor grew its number of meetings by 45% and number of key account meetings by 55%. 
6. Ryerson brought in $27,000 more in profit and 2.5 times more qualified calls per month.
7. Fibernetics saw a 30% increase in calls during the timeframes when their sales team is usually at its lowest energy levels.  

*Note: In full disclosure, these are all LevelEleven customers. Learn more about their use cases for sales activity management here.

These are just a few examples of how modern sales leaders are benefitting from sales activity management technology. With proven instant ROI, we can only expect the use of this type of software to grow.  As Salesforce says in their 2015 State of Sales report: High-performing teams are the first to embrace technology. Will your team be one of them?