Running sales by the numbers. In today's day and age it's very easy for you to establish to gain great visibility over your actual sales activity using modern CRM systems. We've deployed CRM systems like Salesforce.com for many different clients. They allow us to quickly establish a dashboard that gives us accurate accounts of all calling and customer proposal and visitation activity. If you run your sales by the numbers and look at that activity on the daily and weekly basis, it's very easy for you to quickly see what patterns are emerging in your sales team performance and act accordingly in terms of zeroing in on corrective actions that need to be taken with individual team members in order to boost their overall sales results.

Running sales by the numbers has never been easier using modern activity measurements systems such as those found in Salesforce.com. The key to setting up those systems is to make sure that you've got a clear understanding of exactly what matrix you want to track prior to designing your system and how they align with the accountability and individual responsibilities that you've assigned your sales team so that the activities that you're tracking are the same matrix that you're holding your sales team accountable for. But that's quite easy to do as long as you do a little advance planning prior to deploying your CRM system and at the time you're actually setting annual sales goals with your individual sales team members.

We've found that its really helpful to break down your sales activity into as much granularity as possible to be able to count the fundamental ratios between number of raw activities and number of more refined activities. When I talk about raw activities, I mean attempts at phone calls. When I talk about refined activities, I'm talking about number of actual connects with potential prospects that turn into qualified opportunities and of course, the even more refined activities where you take a refined activity and turn it into an actual opportunity and an opportunity into a sale. So, all of those different levels of activity, from raw to more refined, are possible with tract using a modern CRM solution.

A lot of companies struggle in this area because they don't have the expertise to integrate their sales process with their CRM system. This is one of the things that we specialize in and make it really easy for you to get the numbers out that you need in order to more effectively manage your sales force. So, running your sales force by the numbers doesn't need to be guess work in today's day and age. If you're having problems finding a solution for this, it's very easy to find a consultant to help you to do what we call sales process integration with CRM, allowing you clear visibility and clear accountability over your sales effort and your sales team's day to day activities.