3 Metrics for Better Sales Rep Coaching

Every sales leader is tasked with getting more of their team, but how do you break out of anecdotal based recommendations and start looking at quantitative data to inspire improvement? Well you have landed in the right place! Here’s three metrics that go a long way to have the data to point out areas for growth that can support tailored coaching to a rep –

Stage to Stage Conversion Rate & Cycle

Reporting on stage to stage conversion and cycle is an outstanding data point to illuminate where deals are getting stuck or dying on the vine for your sales rep. It allows you to look at the full sales funnel and understand if there is a specific early stage in the sales process that the rep needs better coaching in applying the sales methodology in place or if it is something later in the process where they need better negotiation tactics. This may expose areas of improvement of resources being available for the representative as well. For example, you may find things are not converting out of a late stage that includes legal review and it’s time to drill into the process between sales and legal that is a huge piece to getting deals over the finish line.

Beyond the percentage of opportunities that a rep owns and what the conversion looks like from stage to stage in your sales process, is also looking at the time a rep has a sales opportunity remain in stage. For this you would want to look at both the average and median days that opportunities are staying in a specific stage. Gaining an understanding of where deals are sticking in the sales process for your rep especially in comparison to the overall team, region, or even higher performing reps can be a chance to find ways with the rep to accelerate deals in that stage.

Pipeline Coverage

Every rep should have a clear view of how much open pipeline they have in comparison to their target for both the month and quarter. The typical baseline here is five times the pipeline to quota or target for the time period, but this may vary depending on what conversion rates of SQL to won look like for the rep and team. This will allow a leader to steer the rep’s activity coming out of a coaching session or general 1-on-1 based on what their coverage looks like. If it’s not hovering around 5x, then the rep should be ramping up their net new pipeline efforts. If it does appear to be an appropriate pipeline coverage for the time period, then committing more bandwidth to getting deals down funnel would be of higher importance.

Pipeline Coverage = Open Pipeline/Quota

The other layer to looking at the rep’s pipeline coverage is also pointing out deals that may need to move out of the pipeline or coming up with strategies to get to a win or loss. We typically recommend looking at the age of an opportunity layering in the last activity or last meeting dates to start to understand from a data lens which deals we can recommend to closed lost or throw the final hail mary to free up bandwidth to focus on the opportunities with a higher likelihood to convert.

Closed Lost Reasons

Analyzing closed lost reasons is a key data point at an organization level, but getting granular to the rep level can create windows into where a sales rep can improve. Getting to the % of closed lost reasons for that rep is key, but also analyzing the % of closed lost reasons by stage they were lost can provide key insights into coaching areas. For example, you may find a rep is losing 75% of their opportunities out of a demo stage due to the product and be able to dig into how the sales rep is positioning the product or even how they are preparing a solutions engineer for demos if they are not doing the demo themselves. Another key area we often see is understanding where reps are having deals go cold to unresponsiveness as they have labeled the closed lost reason as such. Taking those opportunities to understand why they may have gone cold can be a clear line to a coaching moment and getting more deals to the next stage in your sales process.

LeanScale also highly recommends having not just a closed lost reason picklist in your CRM for reps to select when they are losing deals, but also a comments field where they can get descriptive on why the deal was lost. This can add the qualitative aspect you may need to get one step deeper from the qualitative data point you have isolated.

Summary

These are only three metrics that you can use data to highlight areas for increasing rep performance. Layering data like this on top of sales meeting recordings can start to turn your sales coaching sessions from a “stories from the field” and a reactive coaching mentality to a proactive approach to coaching reps.
If you need assistance on how to get this data from your CRM, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me!