Making Your Number - Webinar 1 - Condensed Transcription

Connie  0:25  
Wonderful, good morning, everyone, we are now live. Want to welcome you all on behalf of Jonathan, myself [Connie] and David to setting KPIs reps care about understanding the link between activity and results.

Connie   0:41  Awesome. In the studio today with me I've got David McMurdo, a sales coach with over 31 years of experience. And our CEO at Numerik Jonathan Hubbard.

Connie  0:55  We're going to give you a run through of how you can drive sales success using KPIs and also give you a product demo of some brand new features that we're bringing to Numerik this quarter.

Connie   1:38  All right, first up, we'll have our guest David McMurdo, he's going to talk us through how you can use KPIs to improve sales results in your sales team. Afterwards, Jonathan's going to give us a product demo of the latest two special features that we've just finished developing for Numerik.

Connie   2:07  Now, if your question doesn't get answered, You don't need to panic because we will be having a post-stream Q & A in the Working Numerik.ly LinkedIn group. If you're able to, search that up and join. 

Connie  2:23  With that out of the way, I would love to hand this over to David. David, how can we use KPIs to drive our sales success?

David  2:33  Great. Thanks very much, Connie. Welcome, everyone...it's an absolute pleasure to be here today. And real joy to be partnering with Jonathan and the Numerik team. A terrific product, as you've may be aware of in the past, I think the new features you're going to love as we go forward.

David  3:03  Today I'm going to give you a little bit of background on myself to establish my credentials. And then we're going to deep dive into how to set KPIs, and the sort of KPIs we should set for our teams. There's some good useful tips and techniques and I'll also explore some of the mistakes that people make. So without further ado, let me dive in. Who am I? Well, I've been working with businesses globally across, I think it's now 49 countries around the world for over 30 years. McMurdo Consultants really focuses on what we call sales transformation: in essence, helping organizations transform their strategies, their processes, and their capabilities that lead to greater success, both on top and bottom line.

Last year, I was lucky to be included on an Australian list, which was the top 15 sales experts to watch in 2021. It's taken long enough to get there, but I was delighted to get that. Interestingly enough, quite a few years ago now when I first came back to Australia, having worked offshore for quite a while somebody said to me, what is it you do and I always refer back to a quote the my little daughter at the time who was six at a school Father's Day they asked the children what does your Dad do and they were saying, "Dad's a lawyer, Dad does this." And I remember my daughter very proudly stood up and said, "My Dad helps other people make money." And that's been my sort of strapline ever since. 

David 5:38  But again, let's have a think. And let's today look at setting KPIs, yet another one of those key components. And then Jonathan will pick up in terms of how Numerik can actually track those KPIs. So without further ado, let's have a little look at what drives sales success. 

These two models are used in facilitations, with almost any organization I deal with. And for me, they're two really simple models, but the one that really focuses you as sales leaders or as salespeople on what it is we need to do is here on the left hand side. I call this the simplest management model of the lot: we call it the Rack Model. The thing I've loved about sales over the years is it's very simple, in some cases to actually understand if we're succeeding or not. And that is by the results that we achieve. Rack is all about having clear results focus, but what creates a result? 

David   6:55  Well, the result, interestingly enough, is history. The result comes about and pardon the pun, as a result of the activities we put in as salespeople and as a business. But what gets us to put in those activities? Human nature says we do what we feel comfortable doing. In other words, if we do some activities, they don't necessarily work out: the risk is that we go back to doing what we're actually comfortable with. We've got to make sure that we put in activities that are going to drive the results. How do we do that? By making sure that our teams have the capability, feel comfortable putting in those activities, and to drive, protect, or potentially change results for the future. If you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. In other words, unless we change our activities, we're not going to change our results. But to do that, we've got to make sure our teams have got the right capabilities. In fact, one of my marketing team many years ago said, "Look, Dave, we shouldn't call this the rack model, we should call it the car model because it drives the business." 

David   8:23  Let's look at the other model on the right hand side. These are the three fundamental elements that a salesperson needs to put in to ensure they get the outcomes that they need and the business needs. The first thing we've got to do is make sure that our teams undertake the Quantity of Efforts. It could be phone calls, it could be face to face visits, it could be new product demos, etc. We've then got to make sure that it's not only about the quantity of what they put in, but also the Focus of where they put that Effort. Are they putting it in with the right customers? Are they putting it in the right market segments? Are they talking about the right products that will drive success? And finally, we've got to look at the Quality of what people do. We can measure quality through things like conversion ratios, how well are our teams doing in a particular market segment. But those three elements together, combined, the Quantity of Effort, the Focus of Effort and the Quality of Effort will actually drive the sales results. It's amazing how many people just purely focus on the quality or quantity. That's one of the things that we're going to talk about in relation to KPI setting. It's about balancing our view. 

David   9:44  Whilst results are key to track results are history and this is where activity management and the balance of our KPI setting is critical. A KPI is quite simply an enabler for our business strategy. You imagine we've gone away and set ourselves a plan for our sales business. That's all well and good as a sales leadership team, but how do we ensure we enable or make that strategy come alive? Well, KPIs are one of the methodologies for making that happen. A KPI should be giving our sales team a clear focus for what they need to do to enable our strategy. First of all, KPIs should clearly articulate the results that are expected and where those results are going to come from. They should clearly articulate the activities that are expected to drive those results. And at the end of the day, they should help leaders understand the quality of what the sales team is undertaking. Additionally, KPIs should form the basis for coaching.

David 11:07 Referring back to that Rack Model that I talked about, a KPI should really include all of those particular elements. Yet too many times they are too simplistic which is a common mistake. I've got organizations I've started to work with, and the only thing you see is a revenue target. And it's an overarching revenue target, "we want you to achieve a million dollars worth of revenue in the next year," it doesn't even include margin. It's down to the salesperson to determine where they get that revenue from, and it might not be in line with your strategy: that's a huge risk. The activity numbers that people focus on are sometimes very basic: the total number of sales visits, the total number of proposals. And what I found over the years is if you just give salespeople those baselines, guess what? They'll hit them. But the problem is, they might not be with the right people. And proposals might not be the quality you need to drive sales success. Usually, KPIs aren't used as a coaching tool. They're just pure numbers only used as part of a review process. So how can we turn KPIs into something valuable? If we think about a result KPI, they should align with and enable the overall sales goal and strategy. They should include revenue and margin targets. Overall, they should include targets by product category, they should include targets by the type of customers that you want them to do business with,  maybe your key accounts, your A's, B's, C's. And of course, they should include targets by the markets that you want to do business in: the commercial marketplace, the financial services marketplace, the industrial marketplace, etc. Because that gives the salesperson a focus for where they should be putting their efforts. Afterall, we know what gets measured: gets done. 

David   13:50  This is where we should now start thinking about activity KPIs: Overall sales meetings, but also sales meetings by maybe category sector and the markets we're going into. Which customers should we be chasing? What other proposals should we be chasing? And not only looking at a proposal target, but crucially the conversion ratios from the proposals you're putting out. It's pointless doing 50 proposals if you're only winning one- you want an indication on the quality of activity salespeople are putting in. If you've got low conversion ratios, it could be that the look and feel of the proposal isn't very good and they're missing the mark with the customer. But again, it's the overall numbers and putting the detail in behind those numbers. Other activities we should be thinking about with KPIs: quarterly business reviews, new range presentations (that help give us a direction and give the sales team a direction), product training (critical if you're dealing through people like wholesalers and distributors - it's interesting that the more they know about the product, the more they're likely to sell if your product), average order size. And as I've said before: conversion ratios. This mix of KPIs is absolutely essential because it's not only giving you a result target, but it's really starting to show you how you're going to achieve your results. That is the real critical component of setting KPIs. What do we want to achieve? How are we going to get there? When your metrics come in, how do we track people in both of those areas? 

David   16:02  That's a real overview of where I believe KPIs should be focused. But without further ado, I'm now going to hand over to Jonathan to show you how Numerik can help enable those KPIs. Jonathan, over to you.

Jonathan  16:26  Thank you very much, David. That's a very good overview of what's important with KPIs.My name is Jonathan Hubbard, CEO and founder of Numerik, and we've been working with sales teams over the last few years to help them make the numbers. I'm going to provide a brief overview of Numerik's concept. The Numerik concept is sales target software. And the Numerik vision is to be the world's most engaging sales rep app. Because what we've seen in working with hundreds of salespeople over the years, is that it doesn't matter what CRM, BI tool, ERP, if you don't have engagement from the sales reps with the technology, you've got nothing. It's a really hard push, reps using it not because they want to, because they have to, and we want to really flip that around, and produce a tool that reps actually enjoy using and get serious benefit from. 

Jonathan 18:06  The way that we do this is by engaging reps with the thing that's very close to their hearts, which is the achievement of their targets. What we found is that reps get really passionate about sales targets, a lot more than they do about a weighted pipeline or something like that. Targets are the fundamental thing that proves success: reps are judged on whether they achieve the numbers or not. In Numerik we have target cards which live update in real time with data coming through from your ERP. So here's an example of a target for May and you've also got a target for the year. 

How these work is we break that overall target for the full year down to every single day. We then factor into account seasonality, take out holidays, work out when invoicing normally happens and produce what we call a Paceline, which is where we should be at a given point. We then measure the variance for that particular Paceline: all in real time. In the previous example, it’s showing we’re 23% ahead of the Paceline for May, which is $230,000. The Paceline concept comes from the idea of Olympic swimming where they have the world record paceline that flows along in front of the swimmers. That's exactly the concept we're using Numerik. At any point in the race, you can tell where you should be. In the example, you can see I'm doing alright for the year, but I’m behind the Paceline for May by 4%. 

Jonathan  20:26 We also track views: how often these target cards are actually looked at by the sales team, which is really important. It's like LinkedIn, we are tracking engagement. And so you're saying right, how often is your what sort of engagement we're getting on that target card, either, it's actually looking at the numbers. We can then click through the target card to see leaderboards.

Essentially, we’ve got detailed ways to slice and dice the data, but in a really simple format. In this example leaderboard we’re looking at GP percentage swing, but can change what metric we’re measuring. In a customer leaderboard view, we can drill down into the data to instantly see what’s happening, even showing where that customer was this time the year before, which is really meaningful to a rep. I can then break that information down to a product group leaderboard: very quickly getting from the overall target into the detail. That's the standard Numerik concept. 

Jonathan 22:33 This then leads onto KPIs, and the work we've been doing in this area. The background to this is that we’ve had many requests from our users to include KPI management within Numerik. When we looked at the market, we didn’t find any engaging solutions: it's not something that was done very well from what we could see. When we think about the challenges with KPIs we saw that KPI activity wasn’t being input, that reps saw very little value in recording KPIs in the first place, leading to the classic: What would you like me doing? Would you like me selling? Or do you want me doing admin? Taking this into consideration, we noticed that the real activity and engagement was happening on the group chat, not on the CRM. As mentioned earlier, the biggest obstacle really in KPI management is getting the activity recorded in the first place. We can only manage what we can measure and if we're not getting the thing entered at the start, they’ve got nothing to play with. 

Jonathan 25:00 We’d all be familiar with pulling a rep up on a level of activity not being where it should be, only to be told the week has been flat out and they didn’t get the chance to update the system. Ultimately our approach was thinking about the more familiar social posting concept for KPI capture, using common behaviors and content creation. And so today we’re here to introduce the group-chat-like KPI posts feature, and the drive here is to turn KPI activity into posts and make it fun. As mentioned, we started with social media/group chat type behaviors. Within the Numerik KPIs section everything is called a post, which is saved against a customer. We can include photos, videos, voice notes, or files and decide what type of post it is: for example a plain note, or a face to face meeting. The post can then be shared, not only with the team, but also through the likes of WhatsApp, teams, email, text, wherever we want to share that information. We can then categorize these posts: for example, they could be a plain note, or a task, or an opportunity. Then we can tag these posts with a relevant activity like face to face visits, or new product presentations, or the type of post. Then once the post has been created, we have the standard social media type workflows of being able to like or comment on it.‍

A manager could leave a like on a rep’s post to provide them with some motivation throughout the day, coaching the rep in the moment. Once created, the posts become socialized, a place where sales managers and other reps can leave feedback and have conversations. We can post a video, perhaps of the inside of a store, or on a construction site, which creates more engagement than a simple piece of text. I think we all know with social media that video and graphics make it interesting. What the posts also do is they double down as a record of activity on a particular customer, with all posts made in previous weeks or months saved in the same place. We put a lot of effort into getting a rep going to see a customer, what we want them to do after is to record something, it could be a photo, it could be a little video, a voice note could be a photo of their diary. The stream of information effectively becomes a group chat on each customer, where a rep can find their notes quickly instead of scrolling through a WhatsApp group.

David 31:57 Jonathan, can I just interject a second? One of the reasons we’ve been talking is because the biggest challenge that most reps have, or most businesses have is, the rep feels like it's an admin or a chore. If they can actually record what they've done literally in a quick two minute voice post or a minute voice post, it becomes a lot easier for them. If you go back to my age group, we're not all the best typers in the world, to think I've got to spend two to three minutes actually typing up what I've done, as opposed to 30 seconds putting it in a voicemail that I can attach to this. It's a lot easier to do. And it encourages people to do that. And not make it a chore.

Jonathan 32:43 Yeah, that’s good David you’re spot on. Really the driver for this was saying, How can we make this the fastest possible solution for recording something after a visit? That's exactly that sort of efficiency drive that we're aiming for. I mean, you would know this, but some of the large sales teams, corporate sales teams reps, they actually measure the amount of clicks it takes to put something into a system. So that's been a massive driver for this making that so quick. Currently we’re building out the integration for doing a two way sync with a base CRM system, so the information that's entered in here can flow straight back into the base system, and then vice versa. Allowing information from an internal sales team to flow into the posts as well. 

Jonathan 33:35 Here's some examples of some posts that we could produce, maybe it's a new opportunity, after a customer visit, maybe it's a task for the internal team, maybe there’s faulty packaging that needs to be replaced, or a shoutout about products which are doing really well. It essentially becomes a newsfeed, like your LinkedIn feed: the team is creating posts, everyone's watching the feed, you're starting to see that engaging content come through, which really helps to keep it alive and inject fun into that whole process of recording. 

Jonathan 34:45 Because you can create tags against the post, this allows us to start setting KPI targets for the tags. What we’re able to do is set up a target, for example, number of face to face visits in a month, which comes from the posts that have been entered. This allows us to create a KPI leaderboard. The little blue tab across the top shows us the KPI leaderboard, which is showing us the number of face to face visits that have happened for the period, and the red/green is whether they're on target.

This is something that can be shared to the team, so everyone can sort of see how they’re getting on. We could show the leaderboard of new product presentations, but whatever those key measures are for the sales team, let's get those worked out, get some targets set, and watch those in real time. 

Jonathan 36:10 In summary, it's a new, engaging way of working. It's not admin heavy, but fun and rewarding. It utilizes those workflows that are used by users every day, what people are familiar with, everything saved down against the customer creating an interesting timeline of events that reps won’t push back against. It allows reps to action tasks in the moment and save time. And then the KPI tracking against the target is available in leaderboard format. That really means that the activity levels are clearly visible to the team. You start to see what's actually happening, and the team starts to get curious about who's been active, who's been posting stuff recently, what’s going on here: which starts to drive sales performance and transformation. From a next steps standpoint, we're doing a phased rollout of the new post feature, starting the last week of May. In terms of current users, get in touch with the customer success team, to discuss the rollout for this feature for your team, we'll set it up for you. We're also starting on the two way sync starting with NetSuite. That’s the presentation, thanks very much for listening to it!

Connie  38:35 Awesome, cheers Jonathan. Alright, we've got a few minutes left now, everyone. If you'd like to ask David or Jonathan a question, feel free to just drop it quickly into the comment section on LinkedIn. Just while we wait for any of those to load up, I just like to put a question to David, can you give us some examples of KPIs that you want to avoid tracking that might be a popular KPI that people say you should track, but in your experience, you've found is not beneficial?

David  39:07 The two classic ones are well, certainly for me, once which I hate to see is number of proposals. If somebody says to me, you've got to do 10 proposals this month, the risk is with the salesperson is they don't want to miss that target. So they'll do 10 proposals: but the quality could be absolutely appalling. But they’ve done the baseline number. So with something like that, that's where we've got to look at things like conversion ratios, because that will start to give us a deep dive understanding of not only how many proposals they've done, but the quality of proposal as well. The other ones I think I mentioned was total number of meetings. If I have to do 10 meetings a day, I'll do 10 meetings a day. The challenge with that is again, what's the quality of the meeting? Am I putting it with the right customers in the right market area? Am I talking about the right products? So again, classic example, or as Jonathan mentioned around the results target, and I mentioned earlier, I've got to achieve a million dollars a year. But what's the makeup of that? I could actually be going out there and selling a million dollars of product that gives us 5% margin, as opposed to having the right mix of product that could drive a margin of 30 or 40%. So again, I think it's about taking KPIs down to the next level, rather than just the raw number. 

Connie  40:39  Very good. Very good. And Jonathan, could you quickly outline how exactly Numerik ties in with a CRM?

Jonathan  40:48 When we think about it from the recording of KPIs, as we mentioned, is that the way that Numerik works is it's the interface for the rep on the road. 

Connie 41:04  Jonathan, sorry to interrupt you, but I've just had a comment from a LinkedIn user here. And they've said, “So it's really about getting KPI information recorded- by peer motivation, rather than enforcement. Is that right? Whatever rep still doesn't get around to posting their activity?” What do you guys think about that?

David  41:25 Shall I take that Jonathan? Firstly, it is about motivation to do it. And as with anything around putting things into a CRM, if they don't see value of their inputs, through either coaching, or how they're tracking against where they want to be, they're not going to do it. So the motivation thing is key. I like the for rep still doesn't get round to it, I had a major banking client of mine and because they'd re-launched their activity management in their CRM about three times there was a huge degree of cynicism. And I'm saying this marginally with a tongue in cheek, but they actually use completion of their activity management system as a gate opener to their rep remuneration. So in other words, you don't fill it in, you don't get paid. Now, hopefully, we never have to get to that level. But I think there has to be some hard and fast rules. We need this, not only for your own motivation to see how you're tracking, but we need it as a business. So we can make sure we develop the right products, we give you the right support, we give you the right help in the field to make you successful.

Jonathan 42:40 That’s good David, and I think it is a very good question, because it's absolutely right about peer motivation. If a rep doesn't get around to posting their activity- this is the journey that we've been on to make it as appealing as we possibly can to get reps wanting to do that. “Why do I want to do that?” because I'm saving a record of what happened when I was on the call. Traditionally that’s been a type-it-up job, but by trying to make it more engaging, like uploading a photo or video, it's actually something that's interesting. We do see good examples of it, for instance when you regularly take photos on your phone and it pops up with ‘here’s what you did a year ago’ and it’s interesting to see what you were doing. It’s that same sort of concept.

And the second point on that I'd say is that there's the rep who has the choice when they create the post, whether they share it to the team or whether it's just for themselves. So we do give some little control around that. But you know, just finishing off on that is absolutely the direction that we're heading to try and make it as appealing for them to do, so that they do get around to doing it. Thanks for the question.

Connie 44:05 Absolutely brilliant. All right, we're just about at our time, I’d just like to quickly wrap it up for everyone. Just to recover what we went through. We had David bring us some good actionable tips for using KPIs and then we saw how Numerik can support KPI usage in the field. If you'd like to send any questions directly to David or Jonathan, you'll see at the bottom of this screen, their email addresses. These emails are also available in the Working Numerik.ly LinkedIn group. So if you'd like to head over there, we'll have 30 extra minutes of Q & A time once this finishes and David and Jonathan will be around to answer any of your questions. Again, you can also email them directly.

We would like to just give you a quick little teaser of what we've got up next quarter for our next webinar. We're going to be looking at using customer goal cards, a really great tool if you use customer rebates in your business to drive sales growth. If you know anyone who would be interested in this, definitely contact Jonathan, or get in touch with us on LinkedIn if you'd like to get them set up with an invite. Other than that, that'll be coming in July. Awesome.

Well, just on behalf of everyone here, I just really like to thank you guys for attending the liveshow. I want to thank David for coming along and sharing his insights. And thank Jonathan for sharing a demo. I hope everyone has a really great rest of their day and be in touch soon.

Cheers, everyone.