The Importance of Scorekeeping

Most sales teams when confronted with sagging results, realize how essential sales culture is to ones ultimate success. However, defining exactly what is meant by a term as broad and indistinct as “sales culture,” can be more difficult. What’s more, it is sometimes difficult to identify the specific areas where a sales staff is lacking. It doesn’t matter how much time, energy and resources are directed at a problem, if the problem isn’t properly diagnosed, it is impossible to make any progress. This is why scorekeeping is an absolute necessity for finding the adjustments to sales culture that can maximize the ROI from your leads. And there is no more effective scorekeeping tool than a Lead Management System like Leads360. A concerted effort to reform sales culture driven by precise metrics that allow managers to accurately diagnose problems so that they can fine tune solutions is a wise investment. An LMS keeps track of these metrics so they can be judiciously employed to help your sales staff to work smart.

The insurance industry is in the process of shifting its focus towards new media. However, with internet leads coming at such a high cost, it is even more important that the ROI on each lead be as high as possible. This being the case, the worst move a team can make is throwing good money after bad ideas by making investments to fix a broken sales culture without knowing what a clear idea of what it is that needs to be fixed. The only way to ensure that the money invested in internet leads is being invested wisely is by carefully tracking the successes and failures of your sales team so that strengths and weaknesses can be identified and either exploited or corrected. The importance of a methodical, strategic approach to sales cannot be understated, because success doesn’t happen by mistake. Every successful company has started with a solid vision, and then has taken the time to analyze and make adjustments to the business on a consistent basis. Up keeping the health of the company will ensure success well into the future.

One of the key approaches to these essential metrics that is the key to effectively driving sales is scorekeeping. Managers should treat the metrics they have about their sales staff in a fashion similar to that of a baseball manager. By tracking statistics on individual salesmen and the team on the whole, a manager can be specific in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of individual members of their team, and the team as a whole. This has a number of important uses. One of these is effective sales routing. By using advanced metrics to grade the strengths and weaknesses of each member of the staff, a manager can subsequently fine tune their lead routing to ensure that leads are getting placed in the hands of those salespeople who are most likely to close them.

Scorekeeping will also allow a manager to identify broader issues that need to be addressed with sweeping changes that impact the sales team across the board. It’s absolutely essential to the success of a sales team that they be able to respond to every lead within five minutes of receiving it. When people shop for insurance online, they are much more likely to respond to a sales call if it reaches them while they are still online shopping. If a sales team isn’t getting the results it wants, it can sometimes be fixed by something as simple as improving lead distribution so that the leads are contacted sooner. There are a variety of other issues that can be diagnosed with a metrics driven approach. For instance, best-practices statistics indicate that the majority of high-growth agencies only spend a third of their time servicing their book, choosing to instead focus their efforts on growing their share of the market. Meanwhile, slower growing agencies invest the majority of their time and resources into servicing their book.^1. These sorts of inefficiencies can be identified and addressed by an agency that’s focused on metrics, while those agencies lacking a systematic approach can labor away for years without realizing that they’re wasting their efforts.

Any good LMS will produce reports that allow you to measure performance. With Internet leads, watching the metrics is critical to success. Focus on key milestones that will demonstrate consistent, repeatable return on investment….metrics can be tracked by salesperson, lead provider, team or company and will give you the key information you need to fine-tune training, adjust your distribution system, review your filters, evaluate lead providers, and continue to increase your success with internet leads. ^2.