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“What are the smart companies doing?”
I’ve gotten 500 different versions of this question.
At Ambition, we’re committed to proactively providing our modern sales community with tools and access to expertise that they can utilize before ever adopting Ambition’s sales management platform. We’re curating and combing our community to provide expert advice, trends and best practices, direct to you. This is the heart of our new sales managers coaching templates (live now!) and other templates (coming next week!).
What we've found, as we continue to do this work, is that sales is undergoing a dramatic transformation, and visibility and coaching are driving that change. And in a nutshell: that's what the smart companies are doing.
Sales Scorecards: More Important Than Ever Before
Sales scorecards are a huge piece of how teams create that “gotta close my rings” accountability with their reps as well as chart a clear path to success daily, weekly, and monthly.
I'm honored Ambition is enabling many of the most dynamic sales orgs in the world. Which means we sit in the unique position of watching and learning from fellow sales leaders as they adopt our tools and utilize them to maximize their own teams.
How the Pros Build an SDR Sales Scorecard
Recently, I took the time to pull Scorecard data from eight of the best known SaaS companies we serve — all of which I personally look to for best practices. Our data team and I then evaluated the activities, metrics, structure of the sales scorecards. To keep things specific, I only wanted to dig in to the metrics used to power Sales Development scorecards.
Setting daily targets is key
Of the eight SDR orgs we looked into, all of them set daily targets for activities and monthly targets for their objectives. I think this is really important for SDRs for two reasons:
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Regardless of your business, sales development is a contact sport. You have to continually be chipping away at prospects with a personalized approach to get in their door.
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By tracking activity daily, you have something you can “succeed” at every day. Maybe it's as simple as having made all your calls, but it’s still a win.
How many metrics?
Everyone always asks about the number of metrics they should be tracking for SDR activities. The low end of our sample was 2, and the high end was 5. Most orgs tracked 4.
My philosophy is that the number of metrics is vastly less important than what you’re tracking. That said, a few thoughts:
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It’s important to purposefully differentiate between the activities (what can I do today) vs objectives (what being effective at my activities leads to)
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I like when you see a nice progression between the metrics — e.g., Calls to Conversations to Meetings Scheduled to Opportunities Created.
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Mentally, 3-5 for each side of the coin, (activity and objective) is about the max any person can keep up with.
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Make sure to specialize these metrics based on the roles in your org.
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All except 1 used “Outbound Dials” as a core scorecard metric. The average calls targeted was 55/day. The median was 60/ day. The companies I looked into are all pretty well known (in my opinion), so I think this makes sense. These are highly targeted outbound teams that are trying to create new opportunities by educating and creating initiative.
Determining benchmarks
Regarding: the number of calls, I think sales leaders have to have a healthy balance between
- “How many opps do I need my SDRs to create to justify the investment?" versus
- “How many calls can a rep effectively complete during a day?"
Five of the SDR teams I researched expected their reps to “set” or “book” meetings daily, with all setting scorecard expectations of 1-2 successfully booked appointments per day.
Four of the orgs set scorecard targets on opportunities generated or opps that have been qualified by sales people down stream. The average opportunity target was 11.5.
Again: what really matters is that there's a steady conversion progression from the things reps have the most “agency” over down to the most critical objective results needed by the business.
If you're interested in learning how some of the best in biz are building scorecards, coaching their reps, and running effective competitions: get in touch with us for a free demo!
