CRM & Sales: Redefining Hustle

CRM & Sales: Redefining Hustle
by Erin Quigg – June 2015

Redefining “Hustle”

How do you measure a salesperson’s hustle? From an activity-based and CRM standpoint, is it the number of tracked phone calls, emails, and appointments in a week? What about LinkedIn InMail, Social Media, and text messaging? With the amount of different communication methods available now, does it matter what communication medium salespeople use as long as they are moving prospects through the pipeline and closing sales?

This past season we redesigned our Ticket Sales’ hustle metric by shifting the focus from activity-based performance to pipeline management. Our main objective was to let the reps sell the way that works best for them and their customers. To accomplish this objective, we wanted the reps to focus on advancing quality leads closer towards a sale, rather than hitting certain activity based quotas. Additionally, we wanted our reps to view and utilize CRM as a sales management tool and less like a simple correspondence tracking system.

Going from Quantity to Quality

[dropshadowbox align=”right” effect=”lifted-both” width=”395px” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]“Our new effectiveness metric has been transformational in refocusing sales reps on engaging high-quality customers and building out their pipeline rather than achieving phone call and other activity-based benchmarks.” – Jay Riola, Assistant Director of Business Strategy, Orlando Magic [/dropshadowbox]

Old Metrics:

  • Phone Calls
  • Completed Appointments
  • Referrals
  • Talk-time
  • Hand-written notes
    [dropshadowbox align=”right” effect=”lifted-both” width=”395px” height=”” background_color=”#ffffff” border_width=”1″ border_color=”#dddddd” ]There is a “direct correlation between effective pipeline management and strong revenue growth.” – Harvard Business Review, Companies with a Formal Sales Process Generate More Revenue[/dropshadowbox]

New Metrics:

  • Completed Appointments
  • Pipeline Growth through Personal Prospecting
  • Pipeline Advancement

How does it work?

  • Score – Each metric is weighted with a certain value. For example, a completed appointment is 25 points, a personally prospected sales opportunity is 2 extra points, and each positive movement through the pipeline is weighted by stage and product.
  • Competition – Weekly, the reps compete against one another to get the highest score. The reps are then ranked, top half are winners and bottom half are losers. Over a certain period of time, the reps keep a win-loss record and prizes are given for the top performers.

Conclusion

It’s been four months since we redesigned the hustle metric and already our sales reps are better at utilizing our CRM as a sales tool. They have even started asking for more data on how to streamline their sales efforts. The Ticket Sales management team has done a great job in assisting the sales team with pipeline management by leveraging our pipeline and appointment reports. Having leadership adopt and support this new philosophy has helped the implementation and success of the program measurements as a whole.

In the end, activities are still important because those interactions are how prospects are engaged, qualified, and moved through the sales funnel; but instead of being measured on how many calls a rep can make in a week, we measure our reps on how efficient they are in closing a sale and generating revenue, which is their main responsibility at the end of the day.

Who’s your Hottest Lead? How to Leverage Post-Sale Opportunities

Who’s your Hottest Lead? How to Leverage Post-Sale Opportunities
by David Pierce – February 2014

Identifying highly qualified leads can be an arduous, time consuming process. As a result, it is important to maximize every opportunity with your hottest leads.

Who is your hottest lead?

Instead of looking to the CRM system or hoping for a better leads list, think of your hottest lead as the customer with whom you developed a high trust relationship that resulted in a sale.

In a recently published study of over 500 sport salespeople,1 leveraging post-sale opportunities through upselling and referrals was identified as the most important factor driving the success of sport salespeople. This finding was ubiquitous across all leagues and types of salespeople.

Duane Haring
Duane Haring

Relationships = Referrals

According to Duane Haring, Director of Season Ticket Sales for the Houston Astros, relationship building is the foundation of leveraging post-sale opportunities. “You won’t get any referrals or upsell many clients if they don’t relate to and trust you. Building a strong relationship for the long haul with a client will yield many more referral and upselling opportunities over the life of that customer.”

Setting priorities to upsell

Jason Cohen
Jason Cohen

However, some salespeople fail to seize the opportunity. According to Jason Cohen, Director of Consumer Ticket Sales for the Indiana Pacers, “some salespeople don’t prioritize asking referrals and upselling and prefer to choose the path of least resistance.” Cohen noted that salespeople also fail to understand how an organization is structured, the role of the salesperson in a company, and their goals in using the tickets.

What should sales managers do?

Sales managers should assess a salesperson’s competence in leveraging post-sale opportunities by comparing the sales productivity of those who are committed to asking referral and upselling questions to those who do so less often.

Referral Strategies

  1. Be specific. Instead of asking a generic question like “who else might be interested,” narrow the customer’s thinking to a specific area. For example, “who else do you know in your office?”
  2. Refer back to needs analysis. Use facts gleaned in the needs analysis to identify other people in the customer’s social and business network that could use tickets to the game (youth sports coach, human resource manager at work, pastor at church, etc.).
  3. Do your homework.  Put yourself in the shoes of the client to understand how their world works.
  4. Leverage social media. Use social media to identify who else is in a person’s business or social network.

Upselling Strategies

  1. Identify new ways to use the product. Get customers thinking beyond the product they just purchased into new ways tickets and experiences can be used.
  2. Remember that people consume sport in social settings. Would the experience be more entertaining with four friends instead of just two?
  3. Bundle. Bundle game tickets with other ancillary purchases like parking, concessions, merchandise, and access to premium areas. Product features such as stored credit tickets and all-you-can-eat options can add to the total sale price.
  4. Know your product. Be able to describe the difference in seating quality between price points. Provide benefits for improving seating quality.

1 Pierce, D., Lee, D., & Petersen, J. (2014). Sport sales personnel perceptions of factors impacting job performance: A factor analysis of sport sales activities. International Journal of Sport Management, 15(1), 71-90.

Photo courtesy of Glotzmeister.