Today’s Tip 20 is from Mike Simmons and he’ll provide tips on how to take personal ownership of your success through KPI’s.
What are your own most important personal KPIs? What are you tracking, or what are you now going to track based on Mike’s suggestion?
Join the conversation below and know more about Mike.
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Transcript
You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips Podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from another podcasting friend of mine. Mike Simmons is the co-host of the Catalyst Sale Podcast and the co-founder of a company with the same name: Catalyst Sale. Now, before we get started I should probably define KPIs for those who aren’t familiar. A KPI is a Key Performance Indicator. Now here’s Mike with Today’s Tip:
Mike Simmons: Sales is simple, yet not easy. We tend to overcomplicate things that could be simple, but not easy. We overcomplicate them by adding additional layers to the things that we’re working on. Those additional layers create complexity. The tip that I have for you today is about taking personal ownership of your success. We’re going to talk about personal KPI’s. You’d probably have KPI’s that have been handed down to you by folks inside your organization. Those KPI’s might be related to a number of calls that you conduct. It could be a number of general activities, even emails that are sent out or links to blog posts or whatever, whatever it is, whatever metric it is that they have that can show the general activity that’s happening inside the sales organization. You probably have your own personal KPI’s that you’ve set up for yourself. Those personal KPI’s can be as simple as just going to the gym.
Yet we know that if you just go to the gym and you sit there and drink a Jamba juice or drink some kind of protein shake, it’s not really going to get you towards your goals. It’s not like moving weight around. It’s not like doing the cardio. It’s not like doing the hard work. So I’m going to challenge you to go through and instead of just taking the KPI’s that are handed down from your organization, look at your own business, look at you, manage your territory like it’s your own franchise. Identify those KPI’s that you can look back on where you can look back on the data and you can say, “yes, I did the things that lead to success”, when it comes to weight lifting, I have KPI’s around percentage increase in volume week over week when it comes to sleeping, I keep track of heart rate variability over time, which helps to show recovery and also how well I’m sleeping. I also look at resting heart rate. When it comes to business, what I want to do is I want to see how many actual conversations am I having with customers not the things where I send out an email, but the discussions that I have with customers where it was really easy, where the next steps were very clear where I was able to hold those customers accountable to the next steps, where the customers actually did the thing that they were responsible for. Now, coming up with your personal KPI’s is individual and you know what leads to success inside your business. If your KPI’s are going to be based on activity metrics similar to the ones that you sent inside your organization, that’s okay. Just own your own. But look at things like number of discussions that lead to a demo or a number of discussions that lead to a trial or a number of discussions that lead to an introduction to others inside and organization and over time keep track of those and look back periodically and say, am I executing on my general objectives?
If I’m meeting those KPI’s and I’m executing on my general objectives, keep moving forward. If I’m not meeting my objectives but I’m executing on the KPIS, readjust your KPI’s, but the challenge is that you go back in and make these your own. Don’t just take the ones that are ordained down to you inside your organization. You still have to do those. I mean, you’ve got to keep your job. You’re paid a salary for a given reason. That’s part of the deal when you work for a company, but these personal KPI’s or things you can keep track of on your own and I would also strongly suggest that you limit them to one to two personal KPI’s as you go through the evaluation process. Don’t overcomplicate it. Use something like Google docs to keep track of the numbers because then you can chart that information over time and look to see, “are there given trends over a period of time? Do I tend to execute or perform better against my KPI’s and given months? Are there other months where I perform, don’t perform as well against my KPI’s? How does that change over time? Is there seasonality in the way that I operate my business and how can I use that to continuously get better?” Because the goal here is to get better every day and one of the easiest ways to determine whether or not you’re getting better every day is look at the data, take the emotion out, look at the data.
I don’t know about you but listening to Mike talk through some of the KPIs he’s tracking prompted me to open up some of my own Fitbit generated stats. My real-time lesson learned… I’m not getting enough sleep!
Today’s question is probably pretty obvious, what are your own most important personal KPIs? What are you tracking, or what are you now going to track based on Mike’s suggestion? Join the conversation at DailySales.Tips/20
On that page, you’ll find links to Mike on his favorite social platforms and a direct link so you can subscribe to his Catalyst Sale podcast. It’s definitely worth checking out.
Then come back tomorrow for a tip from David Dulany on Theme Days.