Traditionally in sales there are very few indicators that salespeople are contributing.

We have all sat in salespeople reviews and they go through their pipeline, you know most of it is just hopes and dreams, we have never been able to measure that. Until now. 

How can we measure that a salesperson is contributing?

Get your sales team on an internal social product, like Slack.  I'm guessing Teams works, but Slack is what we use here at DLA Ignite. 

What you do is for every deal over a certain amount you create a channel and add the relevant people from the sale.  Take the "chatter" from email and put into social.

What you will see instantly is who is contributing (because they are updating Slack) and who isn't (they are not updating Slack).

Which deals are real (there are updates in Slack from the various meetings) and which deals are not real (there are no updates in social).

Note: As a leader, you have to drive this, it won't just happen, you must be seen and present.  I would also suggest you drive all your forecast calls from within social.

This will have a massive impact to your forecast accuracy.

How to get sales indicators

Many people see to think that social is opaque, in fact, it's the opposite, it is totally transparent in the way you can measure your sales teams and their activity.

This means you can get indicators from social as to how your sales people are progressing and how deals are progressing, good and bad. 

Our social selling and influence course will teach you all of this, in fact we have create a module in addition, just for sales leaders so they can have governance of their team based on social principles and measurements.

I've written before about how to connect activity on social media and profit and revenue.  So that each business should know at Board level the exact amount of revenue and profit you are driving from social, in effect you should be able to work to to understand how much profit each keystroke will give you. 

De-risking your pipeline

One service we offer is the ability to de-risk your pipeline using social, it's a bit like this blog on how to run QBRs on social media.  But either way you can measure, measure, measure with social is should be a relief from most Boards and sales leaders especially over legacy methods. 

If you are interested in more of this and how social can increase your revenue by 30% and reduce your sales cycle by 40% then give me a shout.  My Linkedin profile is here.