Compared to small business, medium size business sales cycle works in distinctive ways. Measurement of its effectiveness is critical as owner/manager is not the part of all business and transactional relationships.
Most of the Medium enterprises grown from small businesses can't fathom this. So far the business was a person (mostly owner/manager) driven. Sales are through relationships, word of mouth and instinctive understanding of product/service by the manager himself. They are in denial about the scalability of the model across geographies. Marketing is ad-hoc, sales cycle mostly spreadsheet managed. Reports are verbal and not verifiable always. Salesperson chasing targets with low hanging fruits. Bulk business dependant on few major customers or principal driven.
They are not willing to invest in software tool to manage this due to FUD. Fear of incurring a large expense in investing, implementing and training for the tool. Uncertainty about promised results from software and doubts, whether sales team will use the tool effectively. These results in stagnating the growth of the organization.
Marketing is beginning of sales cycle to create a need for the product/service Medium Enterprise (ME) cater to. Marketing defines the target market and demography and generates leads. Marketing and sales working in tandem create positive sentiment for sales growth of ME. More leads and better marketing content makes sales person happy and satisfied. Which, in turn, grows sales/revenue for the ME.
A software tool used must be capable of creating and publishing campaigns to media consumed by target market group.
Important Measures to ascertain sales effectiveness for ME.
Response to lead: Faster the response to a lead, better probability to convert it to an opportunity. Short attention span and deluge of online marketing campaigns by competitors dilutes the efforts of the marketing division. Predefined qualifiers for each product/service in software helps weed out inappropriate leads and allow the salesperson to focus on converting potential leads into opportunity. Software measures the ability of sales person's agility effectively.
Marketing campaign to Solution: Well trained salesperson helps customer translate proposed product/service to customer requirement. With the help of industry-specific collateral, the customer can identify hidden needs.
Closing sales: Some sales person are great in converting leads to opportunity and building a relationship with the customer but fail to close the sales in given timeline. The software can be used to track such sales person and helps the manager to coach or move to a role where his networking capabilities are used.
Deal size of sales: A metric can be used to ascertain the average size of deals where deal below average size is not pursued. A salesperson may chase and close lower deals, which software can flag and helps the manager to prevent low resource utilization.
Periodic activity by salesperson can be tracked by measuring numbers of emails sent, follow-ups, meetings, proposals, closures. These activities can be assigned time bound.
An ME investing in a software tool which manages marketing campaign, tracking of leads, opportunities, conversion, revenue generated reports with slicing/dicing option is essential for an organization's sales growth.