Episode 011 Sales Effectiveness: Sales Metrics Earn Rate

Simone Douglas 0:02
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Good morning, Australia and welcome to the rest of the world. You’re listening to the IBGR network known as International Business Growth Radio network. I’m Simone Douglas, your host for today Seriously Social journey into the humanistic approach to sales and marketing, and depending where in the world you are joining me from, I hope you either have a great cup of coffee or a good single malt whiskey in front of you. It’s early morning here so I am three coffees deep and ready to get this party started. Did you know all of this season’s episodes are available on demand in our community of commerce? Get the complete one hour show instead of just the first 15 minute segment in our podcast lite playlist our complete season a podcasts are located in our community of commerce, which you will find at our website IBGR.network and click the Join Us tab and then click community and you will get immediate access to the entire season of programming which means you will never miss another episode. Throughout the show you’re welcome to reach out with comments or questions either tag us on all the usual socials by searching IBGR network on your favourite channel. Be sure to tag me in as well, you’ll find my links in the show notes or just search Simone Douglas SM. You can listen to stage three business strategies four times a day seven days a week. The time for stage three strategies in Sydney Australia is 10am local time. In Mumbai, India, it’s 11:30am. Accra, Ghana is 6pm and Toronto, Canada is 2pm local time. This is Episode 11. In our C lane at IBGR.network sales and marketing sales metrics and earn rates go to our website at IBGR.network and download the show notes so that you can make the most of your show and keep yourself on track. Today we’re going to be talking about C3 11 sales metrics and and earn rates. Levelling up is always frought with growing pains and often holding your sales force accountable and knowing how to effectively incentivize and support them can be quite difficult. It’s easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large, but jump day is your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your team’s efforts. Today we’re dissecting sales metrics in eran rates looking at how to identify the sleeping giants on your team and the passengers on the bus. Before the internet breaking down your lead sources, and knowing what to focus on was much easier than it is now. Calculations were simple and life revolved around the power of a sales team’s networks more than their digital prowess. Nowadays, with word of mouse being as powerful as word of mouth, there are a lot more things for us as business owners to think about. Sales metrics is ah sorry, sales is a metrics driven contact sport.

In today’s show, I’ll talk about five metrics that you could use to evaluate your sales team’s performance and results. By tracking the five metrics methodically over time, you’ll be able to analyse trends in your results with more clarity. Informed by these metrics, you can focus on the best sales opportunities in the pipeline and set your sales team up for success. IBGR is committed to your success in our programming is designed to give you the tools and resources as well as the one percenters you might be missing that are the difference between feeling like you’re in the pilot seat or preparing for that crash landing. Have a fantastic week, hopefully, we’re going to turn your Hump Day into jump day and you will be all fired up for success. So let’s take a look at the key issues. from an owner perspective. The first thing that we really need to consider is where are our sales tracking relative to our forecasts? Are we on target? And what’s our earned rate looking like? Sales forecasting can play a major role in your company’s success. Accurate sales forecasts allow salespeople and business leaders to make smarter decisions when setting goals, whether it’s hiring, budgeting, prospecting and other revenue impacting factors. But despite the advantages, many sales leaders struggle to create sales forecasts that are anywhere near reality. So we’re going to take a really good look at what it is that you’re using to forecast your conversions on your pipeline and what your close dates are. The other key consideration is which channels are producing the most and the best qualified leads at the lowest acquisition cost. So as you would imagine, the average cost per lead can vary greatly depending on the industry, the target customer and the competition. Depending on the sources you check, you will see numbers that are all over the place. Remember, though, that it’s not just about calculating your cost for your sales lead, but more about the return on investment of your customer acquisition. We’re then going to move on to thinking about what the current ratio of closed leads to sales is in total, and by team member, the sales leads to close ratio is a key measure of a sales person’s efficiency. This ratio measures the percentage of leads that the salesperson converts into actual sales. While it can be misleading to rely exclusively on a single fear, you should keep a close eye on your closing ratio at all times, both as a team and as individuals because this is where you will start to see whether or not performance is dipping, or perhaps somebody’s pipeline is not being fed well enough. So catching your ratios early, when they’re starting to dip is critical to maintaining a successful business and continuing to scale. You also need to I guess, get our head around what are our benchmarks around close rates, and are they improving so a business intelligence dashboard is an efficient way to maintain a deep understanding of your current sales program. These management tools are used to track metrics and key data points relevant to various components of your business, and having insights into these key data points will help your sales team more easily identify the pitfalls in your sales pipeline, but also highlight successes or met goals. The trick here is to have live data and to make sure that what’s getting fed into your system is accurate. And that the benchmarks or the flags that you’ve set within the system are giving you the information that you need in a timely fashion so that you can make informed decisions about what it is that you’re actually doing with your sales team. So at a certain stage in your business, that you will always get to a point where you become further and further removed away from your figures. And this is a really critical time because that’s actually a danger zone as a business owner or manager. Your figures are the things that will give you the indicators of what’s coming, what’s happening, when there are danger signs. But if you’re not interrogating those actively and analysing them regularly, and having robust conversations with your teams about what they mean, that tends to be where you go from being a high performing business to an average business, and then you can start sliding into failure if you’re not particularly careful. So we don’t want to be there. So making sure that you have a really good business dashboard is going to be critical as part of that success. We need to think what are average sales prices per item, and how much are we discounting to close the deal. So whenever you alter the sales price and markup of the goods and services, it’s important to understand how this is going to affect your profit margins, and your sales targets. To successfully run a sale without making a loss, you should know your gross margin, markup and breakeven figures, and how the discounted price is going to affect your profit. If your team is routinely discounting to close out deals, this could cause a hell of a problem down the line. If they’re not considering what the direct impact of those discounts has in the long term for the customer lifetime value. We also need to know, is the sales force on track with their earn rates and commissions. In any sales department, there are two truths to always keep in mind first, sorry, first sales executives like to keep sales high, and cost low. And second, sales reps just want to get paid. Your organisation can offer all the incentives, passion through of competition and inspiring culture they like, but at the end of the day, nothing keeps a sales rep happy like knowing their earnings, and that usually means commission. Tracking commission manually can be difficult especially when factoring in discounts, instalment pays, returns and other volatile parts of modern selling. Smart sales leaders establish, obsessively established clear, measurable key sales metrics as an excellent method of tracking the success of the sales team and improving outcomes. To help you find the metrics that matter to your company we’re spending jump days hour of power reviewing the metrics critical to your success. The concept of key metrics is critical because many businesses are constantly under pressure and have too many distractions. So unless there’s a set of parameters to watch, companies won’t understand the key drivers of success or failure, and even worse, won’t catch things fast enough.

If this is your first time listening, Welcome to the world of Seriously Social sales and marketing, where relationships win you the sales. If you’re a returning listener, thanks for being part of my Seriously Social global business community, it’s great to have you here today, and very shortly, we’re going to take a two minute break. And when we return, we’re going to get into the detail on what we really need to be looking at in order to successfully start having clarity on our forecasts, funnels and pipelines. Now, that’s a big piece of work to be clear. So our pipelines are something that is fed on a regular basis, but it’s where those roadblocks are that we need to get clarity. How long does it take for us to move people from one stage of the pipeline to another? How many outlier deals do we have in the pipeline? Meaning, how many deals do we have that are either below our average sale price or well above average sale price? We know that if a deal is well above average sale price, then realistically it’s going to take longer often to close. And whilst we like those enterprise level deals, provided there’s no discounting involved, it’s something that you will need to throw your weight behind to support whoever’s working on their deal to move it more quickly through the different stages of the sale. All of that will be important. Remember to join the global community that is IBGR. Become a member of our insiders network by going to our website and clicking the Join Us link. Don’t forget to connect with us in real time. During the show look for the pulsating orange question mark in the lower right corner of most pages on our website. Click it to ask questions or share comments about the show. And if you’re listening to one of our podcasts, head over to IBGR.network and check out our current programming. New shows are added every week. So bearing in mind that you are part of a global business community, I want you to get yourself strapped in now ready to really work on your sales metrics. We’re going to take a short break and then we’ll be getting right into it. So you’ve been listening to Episode 11 in our c lane IBGR.network, sales and marketing. Today we are talking all things sales metrics and earn rates on International Business Growth Radio network. I’m your host Simone Douglas and we’ll be getting back to business after a very short break.

IBGR 0:07
This is William Eastman managing partner for Growth Works Media and Station Director for IBGR. One of my job is finding great on air talent consultants and business owners presence and a story to tell. We’re expanding our broadcast team to represent our four core time zones North America, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and the Philippines, the Indian subcontinent and the last four, United Kingdom, Ireland, Europe and Africa. If you are a small business consultant or business owner would like to audition for an on air slot in our six hour show cycle, contact the station director and that is that programming at IBGR.network. We will respond to your email within one business day. Thanks for listening and don’t miss this great opportunity to put the world back to work at grow with us back.

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Simone Douglas 2:34
Okay, and we’re back you are listening to IBGR.network more than a radio station you’re now part of a global business family dedicated to helping you achieve your goals. I’m your host today’s mine Douglas and this is episode 11 in our C lane at IBGR.network sales and marketing. Today’s topic is sales metrics and earn rates, you can go to our website at iIBGR.network and download the show notes to catch you up on the show so far. So moving on to the things that you need to know to overcome some of these key challenges. The first thing that we really need to get clear about is open opportunities in total and per rep by number count, not by dollar volume. This means the number of open opportunities each rep is working on at any given time. You want to figure out how many opportunities are created and by proxy are available for your sales reps to work on. This number is going to tell you the inflow of new opportunities into sales pipeline, and how many opportunities in total your reps have to work on and sell to. If you’re looking at this metric, and you notice your reps don’t have enough open opportunities in the pipeline. You know you need to grow your pipeline by using the Seeds, Nets and Spears Strategy to grow rapidly and as effectively as possible. You can increase sales revenue dramatically by understanding and cultivating the three main sources of your pipeline. So Seeds are leads generated through word of mouth marketing and building relationships with people. Nets leads that come from inbound marketing and growth hacking efforts, and Spears leads brought in by outbound prospectors or business development reps who actively search for prospects. If your reps are running too few opportunities and won’t close enough business and you’ll have less revenue and even more frustrating be paying reps to float around without real purpose. They will have capacity to do more things but won’t be doing them, so that costs the money. Not to mention the idle rep struggle to maintain motivation so it can cause a churn in your sales team. You can also use this metric to make sure each of your sales reps are not carrying too many opportunities. If they are working on too many open opportunities, they will become ineffective at the close. Because they only have so many hours in a day to qualify and close these opportunities, they won’t have sufficient time to work them all, and prospects will feel neglected, which means you’re going to risk losing them, which is not where we want to be. How many open opportunities a sales rep should work on at once depends on deal size, experience level and time needed to service an opportunity. The balance can be really difficult to pinpoint. But you can achieve it by building out a simple capacity calculation and figuring out what the breaking point is, for your sales reps depending on how much time they usually invest into prospecting, qualifying, presenting the solution, following up negotiating, closing and so on. So getting them to track the way that they use their time is going to allow you to find that breaking point, so that you can have more clarity about when they’re at capacity, or whether they’ve got, excuse me, lots of room to breathe and move. The next metric we want to have a look at is closed opportunities in total and per rep. And again, this is by number count and not by dollar volume.

This means the number of opportunities your sales team closed, including both closed one and closed lost opportunities. Let’s look at a brief example just to get our head around. So let’s say Joe is in sales. In his funnel, he worked a total of 31 closed opportunities in the last 30 days, five of them were closed one, and while the other 26 were closed lost, you should find this number for every one of your sales reps at the end of each selling period. So whatever you’re tracking, whether it’s monthly or quarterly, or weekly for that matter, it’s critical to look at this historically and follow it for a solid understanding as to whether each rep on your team worked enough pipeline to hit your collective and their individual goals. Is your pipeline steadily growing over time? Is your sales team opening and closing enough deals? If you see that opportunity creation is low, for example, then you need to check their activity. So what prospecting activities that they’re doing like dials and emails, channel referrals, trial downloads, and anything else that generates lead flow for the sales team is going to need to be reviewed if they’re not hitting that magic rate. Then we move on to looking at the average sales price of all your closed one deals. In the immediate term, this metric will make it easy for you to spot opportunities that fall outside the normal deal size and flag them as at risk opportunities in your pipeline that are significantly larger. In other words, three times or greater than the average deal price should be flagged because typically, larger than average deals tend to have smaller win rates and a longer sales cycles. Do you spot an opportunity worth $100,000 in your pipeline, when your average deal size is $20,000? You need to flag it, you need to talk to the rep who owns the at risk opportunity about how likely it is to close win, and whether it belongs in the sales forecast for that selling period. If the trend shows an increase in smaller one deals, then perhaps some of your reps have learned that small deals are easier to close. So they choose to go after the small fish. Or maybe your reps are giving discounts on a regular basis and that’s affecting the pipeline. In the long run, average deal size over team, sorry over time will help you track when and by what margin you move up market and begin winning bigger deals. If your average deal size increases significantly from your historical average, your pipeline might be changing, it’s time to deep dive into your lead generation efforts and figure out why you’re attracting the whales. A changing average deal size isn’t good or bad. It just means you need to dig into historical data and pipeline generation efforts to figure out how and whether you need to react. What things do you need to refine and are you levelling up.

Then we need to get some clarity around your total win rate and win rate per rep. This means number of closed opportunities that you won. So the formula is closed won opportunities divided by total opportunities that were both closed won and closed lost. For example, Joe’s win rate from your sales funnel is five closed won opportunities divided by the 31 total open opportunities means that his win rate is only 16%. Okay, so at that point, we need to make a decision about what we need to do to help Joe, maybe get his win rate up to 25%. Win rate tells you the success rate of your sales team to increase your individual team members win rate you need find where they have the most difficulty converting opportunities from stage to stage. Analyse your sales funnel by stage, are they losing a lot of opportunities in the early stages, or the late stages. If conversion rates are low in the early stages, your team will need help with such skills as rapport building, better qualification of leads, or maybe product knowledge and demonstration skills. And if conversion rates are low in the latest stages of the sales funnel, you may want to start coaching skills such as managing objections, gaining commitment, negotiation skills, or perhaps even closing skills. All of those things will be important. You are always trying to increase your team’s win rate. It’s that simple, but through setting a solid sales process, consistent training, good sales coaching and sales and marketing support, you can increase it gradually over time, until at a point that is acceptable to the business and steady. When you look at win rate, do it in conjunction with other things such as deal size or lead source. Your win rates can be higher when the original source of the opportunity is from referrals, or from inbound marketing. So when the prospect was searching for a solution like yours and found you, rather than from outbound sales. In other words, when your sales development reps cold call somebody. Alternatively, your win rate can decrease when your sales reps work on opportunities that are considerably larger than your average deal size that you normally win.

From there, number five is the average duration in days it takes to win a deal. You want to know how long individual stages of the sales process take. So your sales cycle is the sum of all the durations within each opportunity stage in your pipeline. It’s important to keep historical data about your average sales cycle to better identify likely buyers and at-risk opportunities. How did the sales cycles of current opportunities in your pipeline compared to the sales cycles of deals you’ve won in the past, the amount of time and opportunity spends in a stage has a high correlation to its likelihood of becoming a one deal. If your opportunities been stuck in the pipeline much longer than the typical one cycle, then this opportunity is less likely to be won. The trick is to minimise your sales cycle by identifying at which stage in your sales funnel, you are seeing the bottlenecks. And know that for each person on your team, this is going to inform you as to which skills you should be coaching and helping them to improve. Each stage is unique. Some take longer than others. It’s important to identify which stages need improvement when compared to the historical benchmarks, so if you haven’t been tracking the different stages of your cycle and where things are getting held up, you’re going to have to start by going back to there. I’ll give you a hot tip flag the opportunities that have lingered in the same stage three times longer than the average won deal. Because that will be a really fast indicator tell you where things are flagging and what the issues might be. So you can look at all of those things to make the most of it. So when you review all of these sales metrics, it’s important to have like a spreadsheet or a dashboard and incorporate it so that you can say how you’re tracking on these metrics by rep on any given day or time simply by opening up a screen. So the challenge, I suppose is that when you’re trying to hold your sales teams accountable or to know whether they’re performing well, it really comes down to having the data first. We’re now going to take a short minute break and when we return, we’re going to cover off on the how. How we track our pipeline against forecast, tracking lead sources effectively, and what we need to look at there, calculating the benchmarks for business, health, checking your discounting and motivating your team. So remember that all of these things become important.

Did you know that all of the seasons episodes are available on demand in our community of commerce, you can get the complete one hour show in our community of commerce instead of just the first 15 minutes segment of a podcast? So don’t miss the action steps in the third and fourth segments that you need to grow your business. You can get the whole lot at the IBGR.network website. So get on there and I will be back.

AD 0:01
Is you CRM making your business grow? When surveyed, about 90% of business leaders admit that their CRM isn’t the most common cause for that. Salespeople don’t use their CRM the way they should. Why not? Well, it takes them too much time and discipline to fill out the CRM completely. And if sales people don’t, the CRM system becomes useless. That’s why when we started salesware, where we asked ourselves, what if we build a CRM system that fills out itself? What if you build a system that surfaces existing data so that you know and remember all about your customers and never forget and disappointed another lead. That’s what salesware does today, it pulls in all the data buried in your emails, email signatures, calendar, phone, social data company database, email, web tracking, and offers it to you in an easy way, so you and your serum are always up to date. Want to see this for yourself? Head to salesware.com and get your free trial.

IBGR 1:04
This is William Eastman Managing Partner for Growth Works Media and Station Director IBGR. If you listen to any of our broadcasts, you know we consider entrepreneurs part of one family. People who are the heroes of our societies because they put their soul into the game and risk failure for everybody else. We want to meet and get to know everyone like having a family reunion. Plus, provide the highest quality of programming we need to hear from you. The place to start is to become a subscriber. Every week, we will send you our broadcasts and schedule links to show notes and occasionally a gift like something practical from our toolbox. It is simple to do go to our Join Us page sign up and become part of the most important global community. Entrepreneurs never forget, we create a 50% of the jobs around the world. We look forward to

Simone Douglas 2:35
Okay, and we are back you’re listening to the IBGR.network. More than a radio station you are now part of a global business family dedicated to helping you achieve your goals. I’m your host Simone Douglas and this is episode 11 in our c lane at IBGR.network sales and marketing talking all things sales metrics and earn rates today. You can go to our website at IBGR.network and download the show notes. Remember, you can listen to stage three business strategies four times a day seven days a week. The time for stage three strategies in local time is in Sydney, Australia from 10am, Mumbai, India from 11:30am. Accra, Ghana is 6pm and Toronto, Canada is 2pm local time.

So we’re moving on now to what you need to do, or the how. So first thing that we need to consider is that you need to know your pipeline where our sales tracking relative to our forecasts also where is our revenue coming from retained customers versus new deals? And what are the sources? to do all of these things you need to track your lead sources effectively both online and offline and evaluate the data. Leads find companies through dozens of channels. The latest digital technologies enable marketers to capture and analyse lead intelligence wherever it originates. For marketers who want to track a closed loop experience. It’s really critical to have the right marketing and sales technology in place to gather and analyse lead data, organise the lead data, tracking engagements and touchpoints through the sales cycle, tie activities to outcomes and continually analyse lead sources that bring the most qualified leads to your business. As digital marketing takes precedence, marketers aim to meet consumers where they prefer to research, engage and purchase online. How does the business rank in bringing in quality leads from the following sources? So I guess one of the first and most obvious ones is blogging. So blogging efforts optimise your website for new visitors and nurturing and help to nurture existing leads. So we need to track things like blog entrance pages, engagement, RSS subscribers and call to action click throughs incorporated into your blog content or layout measuring the impact of that channel. There’s also premium content. So does your website include a library or gated premium section of content like resources, ebooks, podcasts, white papers, and so on? Okay, well, there you’ll need to measure premium content pieces for overall downloads, as well as individual topic or campaign performance. We definitely want to make sure that our website is optimised for organic search with persona-focused content that gains an advantage in organic search. So an answer to your organic search should be relevant and provide value to the visitor, and what we want to look at is whether or not our organic search results are on the rise and whether we’re showing up for the right keywords. Then we need to take a look at our email marketing, so how advanced and engaging all the email nurturing campaigns that we’re running, you know, having a look there at how we benchmark for things like open rates and click through rates, as well as enquiry rates off the back of our email marketing campaigns.

We get down to digital advertising, so do we pay for banner ads, social ads and paid search or retargeting campaigns? If we’re trying to gauge the effectiveness of paid channels, we need to measure things like impressions, click through rates, and then content engagement. After that first click. I always like to look at last click versus first click attribution models here in terms of where did the customer start the conversation with us. Quite often they might have come across this on a variety of different channels. So following that path of travel can be really difficult. Okay. Media coverage is another one to consider. So that optimises your website with referring links and can improve overall brand awareness and credibility and make sure your company is top of mind through the sales cycle. So tracking visitors coming to your site, from PR efforts or brand mentions in the media allows you to qualify this channel as those visitors become leads and work through the funnel. Can’t forget social media, of course, we wouldn’t be very seriously social without it. So as more consumers go to social media, for customer service, or to poll friends and family, we need to evaluate the quantity and quality of your brand followers and tracking engagement overall, an overall reach of each social channel. From they can consider goals that impact leads and bottom line impact. So tracking social media, as your referring source to downloads, form submissions, registrations and sales is going to be important. Last, but certainly the most important is your website. Is it a lead generating machine because it should be. Your website has this valuable persona focused content and contact information, product and solution information and more. It’s also likely the hub that social advertising event, email and other tactics drive traffic to. So teaching your leads to your website for solutions and relevant information means that you need to make sure that your website set up to collect those valuable lead insights. We can’t forget all of the traditional forms of lead generation because they still work. It’s not all about digital. So if you’re still sending direct mail, how are you measuring the leads generated there? Are you driving further engagement with vanity URLs to supplement those pieces? Do you have calls to action that will further qualify leads and track online activity. If we are looking at traditional advertising, are you looking at print, radio, TV or billboard ads? Are you tying this data to leads and sales with dedicated promo codes vanity URLs or calls to action that prompt impressions to turn into identifiable leads. Sponsorships are still a pure pay to play model so it’s critical to track leads and sales generated for bottom line returns. Start by organising all these sponsorships that your organisation pays for evaluating the goals for each and then put processes in place for trapped measurement against those goals. Often events and organisations is sponsoring or willing to help you provide value. So if you’re sponsoring an event, work with the organisation to promote tracked landing pages and the like. So events and shows are an investment for brands at all stages of the marketing funnel from awareness with new prospects through to the loyalty and retention of existing accounts. When measuring effectiveness of events as lead generation drivers, you need to consider things like cost per new lead overall quality of each events lead generated and how many of those event leads turn into longer term sales opportunities. The danger here is having a small window. So we just signed a client literally this week for a complete digital marketing package, ongoing retainer and that was off the back of an event that I attended five years ago. So you can’t really be sure unless you’re very careful at tracking where these things come from how they’re going to work.

Okay, so we also want to look at things like speaking engagements, inbound and outbound calls. Referrals is a really good one. Encourage others to drive visitors and leads to your website, or if you’re offering training or consultative services, encourage those who have already taken the training to share resources with others and profit share. So you can even bring in affiliate marketing. So there are so many different options, but we also need to calculate our key benchmarks. So what’s the average win rate, average close rate? Average accounts per rep, sales cycle length, average deal size and customer lifetime value. So we need to sit down and calculate out all of those formulas based on what we covered in the first segment. Okay, and then we get down to reviewing our discounting policies. Now, this is something that sometimes we fall down on okay, so health check whether you are discounting your price, your value, or both. If it’s the end of the quarter, and your sales team is looking to make quotas, or maybe you’ve been talking to an enterprise level customer for a long time and want to provide an incentive to close a large contract, be careful with the discounts that you offer. A discount seems like the key to enticing customers and finalising deals, and retail companies try to leverage the psychology of discounts all the time. In a race to the bottom. Lost leaders in retail industries can come out on top, but your potential customers perceived value of your product shapes his or her willingness to pay. Constant discounts erode to this perceived value and needlessly lower willingness to pay even more than free trials, or other promotional offers. Closing an enterprise level deal for $220,000 a year might seem like a huge win. But if that deals really valued at 300,000, you’ve lost $80,000 to close the deal. So bear that in mind. Customers who are motivated to convert solely because of a discount probably don’t understand the true value of your product and it undermines any work you’ve done to create a value based pricing model. So when you skew the alignment between price and value, you make it acceptable for customers to value the product less which can damage your brand and your reputation. Although discounts can shorten the sales cycle potentially close deals. The long term economics of acquired customers through discounts are dangerous. Finally, we want to look at are you utilising commission tracking? Sales people are highly motivated and commission tracking is a great way to keep score. commission tracking drives salespeople to close deals that motivates them to create new pipelines, and propels them to go the extra mile to win a piece of business. But it’s not just about the money, sales people are highly motivated human beings. Commission tracking is a way of keeping score. It’s a way of comparing sales performance with the previous month or quarter. It’s how sales people measure this quarter with their personal best. It’s how they know they are winning, so the greater the visibility of commission earnings both actual and potential, the greater motivation for salespeople to increase revenue. So commission tracking is important to you to drive business performance, but it’s paramount to the salesperson by defining the parameters at this granular level. It gives you major flexibility, it means the commission structures that will best motivate the sales team can be created. It also means that the opportunity to introduce kickers for individual months by increasing the percentage of that month easily identified. We’re now going to take a short two minute break and when we return we’re going to bring it all together and look at why any of the things we’ve covered so far matter, and what to refine to put in place to streamline your efforts. Remember to go to our website IBGR.network and click the listen now tab in the show notes. Look for episode c 11. And make the most of the show you’ve been listening to Episode 11 in our C lane and IBGR.network sales and marketing metrics and earn rates on International Business Growth Radio network. I’m Simone Douglas and we are going to get back to business after a very short break. So make sure that you have your pens and paper ready because we’re getting into what you need to do.