I feel that individual sales updates are the most effective management action for B2B Sales.  It does take time for the sales leader, but it is well worth it.  I find that organizations rely too heavily on sales team meetings.  This does not allow for deeper dives into the actions of each specific sales person. It also doesn’t allow the sales rep to be open with questions, comments, or concerns.  I would recommend these updates take place weekly or bi-weekly. Below you will find the major components of the individual sales update.

Goals

There should be goals and expectations for your sales person. These can include a number of different targets based on your organization and the sales role.  Some of the metrics could be revenue, discovery meetings, new opportunities in the funnel, leads added, or other things that make sense to you.  Your CRM can do a great job of automating the reporting of the metrics. 

Review Deals

Dig into the deals.  Most CRMs allow a board view that provides information at a glance including  company, deal name, revenue, close date, last activity, and the next activity.  I suggest focusing on the deals that are closing the soonest, larger deals, or strategic deals. Ask what has changed since the last update. You can easily dig into the details by clicking through the deals to look at the associated activities.

Meetings

One of the best activities to measure for  B2B sales people is meetings. The initial discovery call is especially important for BDRs and SDRs. How many meetings have they attended since the last update meeting and how many new ones have they booked.

New Targets

If your sales person is also creating the targets for outbound, then new contacts or leads is a great measure.  You can drill into how many they are adding and what the quality is like.

Next Steps

There should be some next steps from the update meeting. Some of the next steps could be assigned to the sales leader as well as the sales person. In the meetings you can not only talk about the future next steps and the status of the ones talked about in the last individual sales update. 

Personal Development

Each sales person should have some items they are working on for personal development. I typically like to get updates for these once a month.  You can create a custom set of activities to be completed in some time frame. Often we will use quarterly tasks for personal development.  These can be simple things like an on-line course, reading a book, trying new software, or anything else that makes sense for your team and sales people. Personal development should not be viewed as something that is generic across the whole sales team, but should be specialized for each individual.

Anything else?

I always leave time for the sales person to bring up anything else they want to talk about. Having the individual sales update allows them this private space to talk about anything else on their mind.

If you would need some help leading or developing your sales team connect with me.