Episode 138: These 3 Metrics Will Grow Your Sales Revenue

I think it's important to share that I've been through those challenges that I know a lot of sales leaders are experiencing at the moment. For me now, though, the key message that I need to pass down to the generation of sales leaders that are following and that are coming through is how I can help you shorten that cycle of learning. My aim is to make sure that you don't have to go through as many hard years as I did. Yes, dealing with adversity is important and you need to be able to learn these skills sometimes from experiencing failure. But for me, I want to make sure that we can try and shorten that cycle as much as we can. Today is all about the three box model. So the third of those four levers and how sales leaders can use metrics to measure their team, but keep them motivated.

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Who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Looking back over what's been a really terrific two and a half year journey of our podcast, and as we close in towards 150 episodes, one thing that stood out to me is how much great content has been delivered through the podcast. And in fact, some of the very early podcasts that we recorded were some of the best tried and tested content that I've been delivering with sales teams for almost 25 years. The type of content that is really worth revisiting after such a long period of time, and particularly because I know that the listener base has also changed, grown and evolved over that time. So for the next four weeks, we're gonna do a blast from the past and revisit some of our finest, stronger sales teams podcast episodes. So today we are revisiting episode 15, which was all about the three box model. This, for me, is a series of metrics that I have used for over a decade. I still use it now. It's a pillar in most of the content and programs that I run and absolutely moves the dial. I've seen sales teams have significant growth in their results just from following these metrics as recently as last month, where a state based team, just by focusing in on one of these key metrics, was able to get their team moving from a fair way off target to actually hitting it. For the month they had 5 out of 16 members hit their target. So it was a terrific result. So enjoy the three box model, one of my favorite tools and an episode that you'll get something out of. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop your super powered B2B sales teams. I really hope you're enjoying the series of podcasts that we're putting out there at the moment. Over the last, let's say, month or so, we've really focused on a topic that it's super close to my heart and for those of you who have missed it, it was called the TeamStepp model. Right. For me, big part of our entire business is being based around the TeamSTEPP model. The last podcast that we went through, they've all been about breaking this model, the teamstep model, down into digestible steps, basically about how to build a team that that'll stay together, perform together. And I think most importantly for me gives you as the sales leader, some structure. So if you missed these, get back and listen to particularly episodes 9 and then 11, 12 and 13. There's heaps of great stuff in there that I hope will really resonate with sales leaders who are out there trying to bring some structure to how they manage their teams, but also who want to bring that structure into how they lead. As an individual. It's such a difficult role to go from being one of an individual contributor through to a sales leader or a leader in any form that I'm hopeful that this structure actually helps you navigate through the process. Okay, so vulnerable moment. I don't know if I've shared too many of these so far, but I've spent so much time putting all of these structures together for our listeners actually based on experience. And the reason that that experience came about is because I was one of those sales leaders who firsthand dealt with the difficulty of moving from being a salesperson and a really successful salesperson at that, into management and leadership in general. I was that guy who at about, I think I was about 24, who was that strong, high performing salesperson, got results, so was knocking down the door for promotion. So I got there by performance, but unfortunately I had no training in any management or leadership skills and when I walked in I thought, hey, this is going to be easy. I've nailed selling. Managing people will be even easier. I don't have to deal with selling directly to customers on voluum like I was before. I learned so quickly that it wasn't about that. And I can tell you, on day one in my team, I actually rang one of the people that I'd inherited as part of my sales team. This guy had been around for years, was a wily fox, wasn't a particularly hard worker, but got reasonable results. He was, let's say he was probably 50 to 60 at the time. First thing I said to him on the phone is really looking forward to working with you. There's some really cool stuff that I'm hoping to learn from you and I'm hopeful that I can bring some stuff to the party that I can share with you. Right? And together we can grow. Phone call ended. I thought, oh, I thought, gee, that went okay. Next day, resignation straight to me with a very clear response that said, I'm resigning because I don't rate my new leader. And wow, was it a whack to the face. Of course. Rang him up, asked him what was going on and he said, how dare you tell me what to do. Looking back, what I realised was it wasn't what I was putting out there to this person that was the problem, it was how I put it out there. But more importantly that I didn't consider how he wanted me to put something out there. So from there it's fair to say that I did a lot of corporate trainings, had a lot of support as a leader. Certainly this incident didn't change any perspective that the business had about me. In fact, it was all for me. It made me realise just how important it was to get training, but I found it really difficult to get access to training that helped me with day to day running of the sales team, building systems, building processes, all the small stuff, all the stuff around alignment and engagement. So I actually floundered for the first couple of years and it was probably three to four years where internally I grappled with how do I actually build a team that performs, that's aligned, that has systems, that has processes, that doesn't leave me going home at night scratching my head as to why I'm doing things over and over and over again. And whilst I had great support from the leaders around me, they weren't necessarily masters at sales leadership themselves or, and in some cases both they didn't have the tools that I needed to help me succeed. Most of my training just wasn't to the point enough to be able to run this team. So for me, I was quite lucky in the end because along came a couple of great mentors completely unannounced that really helped me hone my skills and learn what leadership and management was all about. So by my 30s, I was running a seriously high performing business, a seriously high performing team that for me, I was very fortunate to be able to do because I had the help when I needed it. So that's the vulnerable moment over. I think it's important to share that I've been through those challenges that I know a lot of sales leaders are experiencing at the moment. And if anyone wants to know more about it, I've got plenty more vulnerable moments that I'm happy to share. For me now though, the key message that I need to pass down to the generation of sales leaders that are following and that are coming through is how I can help you shorten that cycle of learning. My aim is to make sure that you don't have to go through as many hard years as I did. Yes, dealing with adversity is important and you need to be able to learn these skills sometimes from experiencing failure. But for me, I want to make sure that we can try and shorten that cycle as much as we can. Okay. So over the last month, we've really looked at four key habits that consistently drive the success of sales leaders. Certainly from what we see, that's building an effective sales process that's focusing on four key levers for peak performance, which is called the teamstepped model that's measuring success. So that's all around what we call the three box model, which we haven't introduced in detail yet. Yet. And last but not least, making sure you have a long term focus on training. So that's training as a coach, but also training around accountability. We also haven't gone through that in detail. What we have done is we've gone through the sales process in detail and the TeamStepp model in detail today is all about the three box model. So the third of those four levers and how sales leaders can use metrics to measure their team but keep them motivated. So let's get into it. The three box model. Everyone needs a form of metrics to be able to measure their team. What gets measured gets done. If we don't have metrics to run our team, we will find that very quickly. We will meander in different directions. That then has a direct impact on alignment and in the end performance. So having metrics is really important. I need to make that really clear. And you'll see content and quotes left, right and centre that talks about the importance of metrics but you'll also find out there data that talks about the importance of not having too many metrics. So for me, and I love this Bob Teague quote, it's all about making sure that we are lighting a fire within people rather than a fire underneath it. Look it up if you get a second. It'll be out through our social media posts this week. But I really focus heavily with my teams about lighting a fire within rather than that fire underneath. Having multiple sales metrics, confusing sales metrics and these dashboard of ways we measure teams for me is the fastest way to light that fire underneath. We don't like that. We want to have a group of sales metrics that will motivate our teams to perform without putting an anchor on that they feel they are measured and watched at every step. So after all, if you are too closely scrutinised you can move very quickly into that state of high stress and high stress doesn' lead to peak performance. So we're going to jump into the three box model today and we're going to hit it at a very high level. We're not going to go into too much detail about creating it, but the good news is that we have a resource that is out there. It's a free resource. DM me 3 box model on any of our socials or even just DM me hello and we'll make sure we get it across to you and it's very focused on driving into the detail as to how you actually build out this model. So if you don't quite get how to step through it today, don't worry, the resources are there and we'll make them available for you. But let's get into it now. So why do we need to make sure we're clear on the metrics that we're putting out for our team? In today's world there is a huge amount of data available to all managers, leaders and individual contributors. There are multiple amounts of CRMs in the market. They're extensive, they're leveraging AI. They can take a huge amount of data from out in the market and bring it into measure on. And whilst that gives us significant opportunity to measure performance, it can also create significant inconsistencies because there is just so much to draw from that we don't end up with a Consistent measuring tool that flows across countries, businesses or even departments within a business. This in turn for me can create huge pressure on the back of house requirements for sales teams. Salespeople are there to build relationships, to strike deals, to sell, to look after their customers, and then to make sure they're happy long term. They're not there as admin, they're not there as people to provide extensive administrative support or administrative data. My experience, they're generally not great at it. So what can happen with too many sales metrics is the alignment of this team. Alignment of sales teams very quickly meanders down a very curvy river. So what can happen is if we don't get this right, alignment very, very quickly suffers. In fact, there's a study out there, I think it was Harvard Business Review. I'll try and find it for the podcast notes where it says tracking too many metrics can actually be counterproductive and it can lead to confusion and a lack of focus among sales teams. So the three box model that we're going to talk through today, it is really about simplifying sales metrics so that we measure what's important. That's the fundamental here. We want to measure what's important, not what's available. So how do we do it? Well, no prizes for guessing. There's three boxes that we use to measure our teams. By keeping it short, we make sure it's really predictable. So it's predictable in measurement, it's predictable in focus. And the aim is to shorten admin and preparation times for one to ones. So what are the three boxes that we work through? First, one number of meetings. So this is the total number of customer meetings that a team member will have in a time period. Why do I use meetings instead of quotes? For me, I like to see at a raw data level how many times our BDMs, our sales execs, any types of sales roles, our care account managers. I want to know how many times they're putting their selves out there in front of customers. If we were to measure quotes, what we'd be missing is that success rate from number of meetings to number of quotes. Right. We'd actually be missing what whether or not we're taking too many meetings to get the quotes out. So that's why I like to start a level earlier. So first box, number of meetings. Second box is the active pipeline size. Normally I'll measure this in dollars rather than units because whilst both units and dollars can actually be deceptive, dollars is actually the general form of currency that Filters through organizations because it's what we report sales in. So box number two is active pipeline size really important. This is your active open pipeline. It doesn't include your long burn opportunities. There needs to be some discipline in teams to make sure that we're not recording active pipelines that have deals that are going to take one, two, three years to mature. And even in some teams we work with, they actually even carve out your Hail Mary type of deals. So those are deals that are significantly bigger than your average sale size. What does significantly bigger mean? Normally I say if it's three or four times bigger than your average size deal, it's a Hail Mary. And often teams will pull that out. So box number one, number of meetings. So how many times is a salesperson getting in front of a customer? Number two, active pipeline size. So this is the dollar value of the total active pipeline. Right. So number of meetings someone might be getting in front of a customer 20 times for a month. Active pipeline size. Someone might have a $6.5 million active pipeline third box. No surprises here. It's the sales you're getting. So your dollar sales for the month also recorded in dollars, universal currency that flows across the three box model and most businesses. And we want to know actually, hey, hey, how much are you achieving for the month? So the above is really simple. Number of meetings, how many times you're seeing a customer within a time period. Active pipeline size. So that's the total dollars of active quotes that you have in the market. And last but not least, your sales that you've recorded for a period. Nice and easy and simple for a team to follow. But wow, does it allow you to drill down in detail about how your team's actually performing? I'll get to that in a moment, but a couple of notes on that before I do will take about 10 to 15 minutes to set up with a salesperson. I always recommend you actually set these three measurement metrics up with a salesperson together to get buy in. And my experience is that once it's set up, it significantly reduces anxiety because the salespeople know exactly what they need to report on each month. The last time I rolled this out with a team was earlier this year. Quarter to quarter sales growth was plus 80%. And this was an established team. This wasn't a team that there was no increase in numbers of people in the team. They had a look at our TeamSTEPP model, our sales process and the three box model and we went plus 80% quarter to quarter. Terrific result. Next bit in Terms of measurement, most teams will measure this across each month. But teams that work on a lot faster, close cycles, higher number of calls, generally shorter calls or shorter engagements with customers might measure this weekly. And teams that work on really long burn really big multimillion dollar deals where they've only got a few going at once. They may look at this across a quarterly basis, but most of the time we'll see it lined up monthly. Last bit on this for me is that each of these boxes actually lines up with the TeamStep model. So a reminder, the TeamStep model was all about peak performance, being a product of your strategy, your talent and your energy. So these actually work in an inverse relationship with a three box model. So number of meetings, box number one is all about the energy that teams are bringing. Box number two, the active pipeline size. This is all about the strategy that teams are bringing, right? So the actual business strategies that will give customers the confidence to allow them to quote and actually work through these quotes without closing them off straight away. The last box. So the sales achieved, that works with your talent, part of your TeamSTEPP model. And this is essentially does the BDM or The team of BDMs have the talent, the tools, the capabilities, the training required to close out deals? So I really like this because what we can do is we can line up the teamstep model and the stages within the TeamStep model with your three metrics. And what it means is that when we are assessing each of the boxes and the performance within the boxes, we we need to look no further than our teamstep model for ideas about how they're performing. Nice and synergistic, because it doesn't need you to go outside of what you're already running within your sales teams. It's very easy for you to leverage the information that you already know and have put out there to your team. But let's go into a bit of detail, right? I think it's worth doing. So if we have the three box model, again, picture on your left, number of meetings, how many times someone's getting out and seeing a customer. We'll use monthly. Then in the middle, the active pipeline size. So how many active quotes has the team member got out there with customers? So we generally again won't include long burn deals or Hail Marys. Right. And then on the right hand side, picture your box there. This is the sales achieved for the period for the month, right. So how many deals did they actually win? So if we're looking at the left hand box and with each of these boxes, I should say that you'll find that they won't always be perfectly meeting targets or perfectly aligned, but they give a great general indication as to the direction that a salesperson's heading. I'll give some examples around what it means when they're not aligned in a minute. But first of all, let's just have a look at what are the inputs that might go into each of these meetings. So if we have a look at the energy we bring, right? So that's the left hand box, how many customers we're seeing per month. So the types of things we're going to be looking for when we're diving deeper into this part of the three box model is things around. Is the salesperson meeting the right people? Are they meeting them at the right times through the right modalities? Are they meeting enough people? Are they generating enough leads? Versus is the marketing team generating enough leads? Are they making the right first impression with customers? What's their lead response time? Right. How long is it taking to get back to customers? I forever have used two hours as the time you should be getting back to a customer within excluding weekends. Are they bringing the right energy into meetings? Are they presenting well? Are they dressing right? Are they using the right language to talk to their customer? Mirroring body language, all those types of things that most sales leaders have learned before. Are they making a good first impression? This is the area we look at around the number of customer meetings. So we've had a look at that. We deep dive. And by the way, I should say this is when we're troubleshooting. Right? So number of customer meetings are down. These are all the areas we can look into to see how our team member is performing. Second one box in the middle, right. Which was active pipeline in dollars. This is all about strategy. So are our team using the right strategies to pitch with customers that will ensure they not just get a quote from us? I mean that's fantastic. First base meeting with a customer, second base actually getting the quote out there. This is actually other quotes. Getting in front of the customer and the customers, working with the team member to actually get to a solution. Very, very easy to quote, quote gets binned, quote never gets read. Right. But it's the right strategies around the products, your pitch, your sales process, the methodology you're following. Right? This stuff's all about the strategy to build pipelines. Is the salesperson undertaking the right needs analysis? Are they identifying the opportunity or the problem? Are they coming with the right sales materials? Are they following up with the right videos or case studies or quoting tools, right? Is the quote good enough? Is it communicating the right information? Is the pricing right? So again, this is not just about getting a quote out there, but it's having an active pipeline that salespeople are working with. And again, when we're troubleshooting this metric, when it's too low, right, we can look at that and say, hey, what's going into this to make sure that we have the most effective sales pipeline. Last but not least, right, the right hand box, which is the number of sales that they're achieving. This is all about do they have the talent? So this is, does the salesperson or sales team know how to close? Are they working on the right customers? Right, so you might have a great active pipeline, but if your numbers on the other side are not high enough, then we can start looking at, well, hang on it. Are they actually working on the right quotes? Right? Is that active pipeline irrelevant because they're people that are just tie kickers or are never going to close? Right? What else is important on the right hand box there around number or around dollars of sales? It's about the right technical skills. Do they have the right support around them to close the actual project or deal reviews? Are the team sitting down and talking through how they can close deals? Is the person getting to the right decision maker? Are they communicating the value that your proposal brings? And really importantly, are they being persistent enough? So are they presenting at the right times? I love the saying 84% of sales are made after the fifth attempt. You can go and Google it. It's anywhere from five to 15 attempts and the numbers vary from 60 to 80 to 90. But the theme is really clear. Persistence is just so important. So I really like this three box model because it allows you to just drill down with great simplicity around how your sales team are going, but still have a level of metric measurement that can get the right processes and systems measured and tracked. When you get all three right, super powerful. I have seen so many teams make a tweak to one of these boxes and have a significant impact on their results. But more importantly, I've seen so many teams where the salespeople just buy in because it's nice and easy. So let me give you some examples of these. So let's just say you've got your meetings, your number of meetings each month and your active pipeline is strong, but your results are poor. So there we have a team member that's working hard, but they're not closing. So we need to look at the talent box. How do we help them close? Let's say your sales numbers on the right are strong and your active pipeline's strong, but your number of new meetings are low. I look there and go, right, we've got a future problem here. We've got a problem that it's going to become an issue soon because the active pipeline will close out. We've got a team member that's bringing sales in, but if we're not putting more new prospects and new opportunities into our active pipeline soon, we'll have nothing to close. Another option might be your number of new meetings. So you're getting out and seeing lots of people, but the active pipeline is low and the closing numbers are low. So that to me says the salesperson's getting the meetings. So they're prospecting well, which is terrific, but the market isn't liking what you're putting out there. So that might be where we need to focus really heavily on strategy or energy. Right? How are the team members presenting? Are they gaining enough trust from a customer to be able to move forward to a quote? These are just three examples, right, where we can see variances, but with every change in the box performance, we can see there's some very clear levers and mechanisms that we can pull. So again, simple, right? For sales teams, it's very easy to follow. I haven't gone down into a lot of detail as to how you create these boxes, but reminder, I've got that free resource that's out there, DM me three box model on any of the Instagram channels we have, or email me and we'll get it out to you. But I really like it because of that simplicity to get it happening. So how do we implement it? Let me run through a couple of tips before we close out for the day. So to get the most out of the three box model, we recommend you use it really consistently throughout your team. So it becomes a system, a symbol and a norm of your team. So you use it in sales meetings, you use it in individual team member coaching or one to one sessions, right? Once a month is normally enough, but sometimes teams will be using it more or less. As I've said, consistency is critical in ensuring its success. Right? So given it's really simple, it should be an easy to discuss metric, that it doesn't require that overt or onerous analysis or preparation, but we need to make sure we're using it consistently. And last but not least, salespeople are buying in super important that they're Getting involved and they're understanding what's happening. That's the three box model, right? Your challenge is get out and do an example of this. So download the free resource. Again, it's the three box model. Message me, DM me three box model or email me and we'll get that through to you. It's a really nice resource that you can use to step through it. But my challenge is get out, do it for one person in your team or do it for everyone in your team and then try for three months. I've always worked off 21 days to learn and then times three of that to build a habit. So you should be expecting it takes you two to three months to be able to build this in and really use it well with your teams. Again, any troubles, let me know. This is something I'm really passionate about, so I love helping people with. So before we wrap up, before we leave, the health and wellbeing tip that I try to put out there every podcast, this one is one I've had explained to me recently and I love it. Vision yourself 12 months out. So vision yourself where you want to be in 12 months time. What does the person professionally and personally look like in 12 months from now? Is it a person that's stepped up in their career? Have they moved to another position? Do they have a successful sales team? Are they fit and healthy? Are they engaged? Do they have children? Do they travel? Right, whatever any of those goals are for you and then step up to what you want to be. So if you want to have that successful sales team, step up in your delivery, step up in how you talk to the team and act like you are in the position where you want to be in 12 months. Powerful. I love it. It's actually working really well for me.

Until next time, keep living in a.

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