Contents:
1. What is an activity-based sales strategy?
2. Measuring your sales team’s activity.
3. Forecasting and planning.
4. Implementing and tracking results.
5. Too long to read? Access our webinar or summary.
What is an activity-based sales strategy?
Table of Contents
There are two approaches to managing a sales team: you can assign them a revenue goal or an activity goal .
But what is an activity goal? Let’s say instead of asking your team to close $50,000, you ask them to call 10 leads per day and meet with eight each week. This way, you give them concrete actions to achieve.
An activity can be measured in different ways: making a call, qualifying a prospect, meeting a lead, sending an email, etc.
Choosing an activity-based approach will increase your chances of achieving your sales goals . If you give your salespeople a revenue target, you’re not giving them the tools they need to achieve it. They’ll try to meet it, but they won’t know how , which often leads to failure.
On the other hand, if you give your team an activity goal, they’ll know exactly what actions they need to take to achieve the goals they’ve set.
First, this will make their work more enjoyable, as they have a clear idea of what they need to do. They will also be more efficient , as their “to-do” list for each day or week will be predefined. Ultimately, this will help them achieve their revenue goal.
So how can you implement an activity-based sales strategy?
It’s a 3-step process: measure, then forecast and plan, and finally implement and track the results.
1 / Measure the activity of your sales team
The first step in implementing an activity-based sales approach is to measure your sales team’s current activity levels.
Take a look at your top-performing salespeople and analyze the activities they carried out to close a deal.
How to measure your sales team’s activity with noCRM.io
In noCRM, you can track the activity of your entire sales team, as well as each salesperson individually. To access activity reports, go to your statistics dashboard in norm and then select ” Team Activity .”
You can customize the report by date range, so you can track activity over the past week, for example. Additionally, you can see how many calls a specific team member made, how many went unanswered, how many emails were sent, and how many meetings were attended.
In short, you can track each type of activity you’ve defined for your team. You can also see how many leads were created, managed, and won, and the number they generated.
Statistics are displayed in a graph, allowing you to easily compare how many activities the team performed and the resulting number of leads.
Data collection is very important in this first step of “measuring.” It will allow you to see who on your team is being efficient and what activities they performed to achieve their results. This means you can focus on them when forecasting and planning.
Provide your sales team with the best tool to manage their prospects and leads
How to create an activity in noCRM.io and define its outcomes
Create custom activities
Some predefined activities are present by default in your account: call, email, email received, and meeting. You can leave them as is, edit them , or even delete them.
To do this, go to your admin panel, then click “Actions” in the “Quick Start” section. On this page, you can edit or delete predefined fields, as well as create new predefined actions .
To do this, simply click on “create an action.”
You have complete freedom over the activity you create ; you can choose the name, color, and icon. Once created, your salespeople can immediately access it in their prospects’ contact records.
Add results to activities
When creating a new activity, you can also add different outcomes . Again, you can define the desired outcome, its name, and color.
The result will be used to record the outcome you want to measure. If your activity was “Call,” for example, you might want results such as “answered” or “not answered.”
Once you’ve defined and created the activities you want your salespeople to perform, they’ll be able to access them immediately from their accounts and record the results of their activity.
2 / Forecasting and planning
Once you have enough data, you can define the level of effort your sales team needs to implement.
For example, to qualify a prospect that will convert into a $30,000 revenue, you know it takes:
• 4 leads to close 1 deal at $30,000
• 20 cold prospects to create 1 lead
Learn more about norm features
You also know that you need on average:
• 3 calls from prospects
• 8 calls, 1 meeting and 2 proposals per lead
But to be efficient and assign your activity goals, you first need to know who to assign them to. That’s why you should start by segmenting your team.
Segment your team for greater efficiency
Once you have a complete understanding of the sales process , you need to segment your team.
Instead of having multiple people handle all the tasks in the sales process, assign specific tasks to the most appropriate person. They’ll perform at a high level and achieve the desired results.
This is the key to achieving your sales goals, whether you have a large or small team.
Recognize the amount of activities needed
After segmenting your team and having a clear vision of who will perform what activity, you must define the number and quantity of activities required per segment.
By following this process, you’ll ensure that tasks are assigned to the right people on your team and that they get done.
3/ Configuration and measurement of results
Checking the correct configuration of the account and the prospect
Set up your account correctly
To ensure your team is successful in completing their activities, you need to make sure you have set up the right elements:
- You need to configure your predefined actions in our tool, following the steps explained above. This way, you ensure your team can report their results in the correct tab and know exactly which activity to perform on which lead . It will also be easier to track their performance.
- Make sure your pipeline has the correct sales stages for your team to follow. This is very important so your team can see and place leads in the correct stage and track their progress.
You can customize your pipeline in norm by editing existing values, deleting them, and creating new ones.
You can also create different pipelines if you have several different sales processes. For example, you might want to set goals only for your acquisition pipeline or at least differentiate it from your renewal or upsell pipeline.
- Another key element for your team is implementing the right sales script. Creating a sales script in our Sales Script Generator will provide your team with the right elements and questions to ask during their cold calls. This way, they can focus solely on their prospect and not on the questions they’re afraid they’ll forget to ask.
Try our free sales script generator
The most important element during a prospecting call is listening to the prospect and understanding their problem and need. After implementing the sales script in your noCRM account, the salesperson will have access to the questions you’ve planned and chosen.
This way, you can enter responses during the phone call, directly into your prospect’s contact file.
If you decide to create a sales script, it’s a good idea to create a “Discovery Call” or “Qualification Call” as activities, with 2 or 3 outcomes such as “Perfect Match”, “Match”, or “Does Not Match”.
Set goals
Once you’ve analyzed all your data, understood the number of activities required to achieve your revenue goal, and verified that your account, pipelines, and prospects are set up correctly, the next step is to set goals.
To do this, you must be transparent with your team. You must assign specific tasks to each member (for example, call 10 prospects a day), tell them what the expected immediate results are (for example, obtain 3 leads), and what revenue results are expected from following those steps. Learn more about norm features
The sales team needs to focus on the activities assigned to them. They need to understand that if they complete the required number of actions, the results will follow .
It is important to set short-term activity-based goals (i.e., number of actions during a week) while maintaining some longer-term goals in terms of revenue or customers on a monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual basis.
Doing your weekly activities should generate the expected revenue . But you shouldn’t just verify this; you should also make it clear to your team that they’re not calling for the sake of making a call, but to generate revenue in the end.
Tracking your sales team’s activities
After implementing activity-based selling and setting goals, you should follow up by tracking the activities and results of this strategy . This will ensure your team is performing well, that they’re accomplishing what’s asked of them, and that you’re achieving the desired results in the end.
Tracking these activities is really easy. You can see what’s been done and the immediate results of the activity in real time in noCRM.
How to track sales team activities in noCRM
As mentioned above, tracking your sales team’s activity is very easy in norm. To do so, you’ll need to access the Activity Report .
In this report, you can see all the activities performed by each of your team members and compare them with the number of leads created in a graph.
This will allow you to see if they’re doing what you asked them to and if the results are as expected. For example, if you’ve set up “Calls” as an activity, you’ll see if the required number of calls are being made and if the expected number of leads are being generated.
If you want to track your team’s daily activity , norm sends you a daily activity email every morning.
All you have to do is check your email every morning and access a summary of all the activities carried out and their results from the previous day. This will allow you to always be aware of what your team has or hasn’t accomplished.
Easily track your sales team’s activity with noCRM.io
Tracking activities on leads and prospect lists
In norm, you can track activities performed within prospect lists and subsequent activities performed on leads. To do this, you can access the Prospect List Analysis Report , where you can select any of your prospect lists.
You can view the overall report for the prospect list or drill down to see individual activities performed.
You can then access the list of activities performed by each assigned salesperson within the prospect list. This will allow you to track their performance with cold prospects and also analyze the quality of the prospect lists .
Below, there’s another similar table, which represents the activities performed once the lead has been created. This table is very useful for keeping track of which team members can convert leads into customers.
How to track conversion rates between sales stages in noCRM.io
Tracking the conversion rate between each sales stage is possible in the pipeline performance report in norm.
Here you can easily view, over a chosen period, the current status of your leads and the conversion rate expressed as a percentage for each sales stage. The percentage of leads that moved on to the next stage, the percentage of leads that remain active in each stage, the percentage of lost leads by stage, and the percentage of leads won in the final stage of the pipeline.
This report provides a clear view of which stage may be causing problems and which is working well. You can then address any blockers by implementing the necessary measures to improve them.
In the Sales Team Performance report , you can also track the conversion rate of leads created by a sales rep.
The “team performance” category will give you a clear view of the number of leads won and the corresponding number per user. These are important statistics for understanding whether salespeople can not only effectively qualify a lead , but more importantly, close the deal .
The information is presented very clearly, as you can immediately compare generated leads with won leads and those canceled or lost. The total earned value of generated leads for each sales rep is also shown. This allows you to measure whether won leads are substantially contributing to your sales goals.
Source:https://www.nocrm.io/es/academy/implementar-estrategia-de-ventas-basada-en-actividades
Why you should keep tracking your income
Although activity tracking is the most important element of an activity-based sales approach, you should still track revenue.
This will help you understand if there’s a problem or if everything is going well and you’re meeting your sales goal . You don’t need to track revenue as frequently as you do activity.
You should track team activities weekly, whereas revenue tracking can be done quarterly or semi-annually.
Access to the company’s performance report allows you to monitor leads created and won, as well as the amount of revenue generated over a period of your choice. This way, you can easily see if you and your team are meeting expectations and achieving your revenue goals.
Watch our activity-based selling webinar below:
Summary of how to implement an activity-based sales strategy
Implementing activity-based selling is a great way to achieve sales goals.
There are several elements to consider to implement it successfully.
First: measurement .
You should gather as much data as possible on your salespeople’s successful lead qualification processes: What activities did they perform? How many? You should track those activities in the activity report and then define the necessary activities to create predefined actions in your norm account.
So, you need to forecast and plan .
To do this, you must first segment your team and ensure each member is assigned the activities they’re good at. Once completed, define how much of that activity they’ll need to perform to achieve the expected goals.
Finally, you need to implement and track results .
The first step to this is to ensure you’ve properly set up your norm account and have a clear workflow that your salespeople will find easy to use and manage. The activity feed will help your team have a clear overview of their situation.
Next, you need to set your goals and clearly explain to your team what is expected of each of them.
Finally, you can track your activity and results at:
Learn more about norm features
- Activity report
- Prospect list report analysis
- Pipeline performance report
- Team performance report
- Company performance report
When implementing an activity-based sales approach, norm is a great tool that makes managing your metrics easier. It provides a clear view of your pipeline and leads, but also allows you to easily track results.
