Ken Krogue

Begin with the end in mind.  How many times have we heard that?

Since I have been busy updating our reporting model for InsideSales.com and tying it to our new 7 Tier Consulting Model I have thought deeply and discussed reporting with many of our team and our customers.  The question is “which reports are really needed for the sales and marketing teams?”

In our industry you can do one of about four things to design reports:

1. Think about the logical categories in your software; like Leads, Accounts, Deals, Cases, etc.
2. Copy what everyone else is doing.
3. Respond to what your customers ask for.
4. Ask what questions your customers are needing answers to.

Which method would you choose?

If you Think about the categories in your software and write reports that work with each category you tend to focus on the product and the features of your product.

If you Copy what everyone else is doing you only do as well as as their best thinking and research and the entire industry seems to get tunnel vision.  (We shy away from this because we learned a long time ago to Zig when everyone else Zags.)

If you Respond to what your customers ask for you tend to go by the prevailing wisdom.  This may be a safe bet.  But what is the result if your customers are typically looking to you for best practices?  If you respond to them when they are really looking to you, this produces a circular loop of mediocrity.  In highly developed industries (of which we are not), the customer is much more educated on what they want and this works much better.

We have tried all of these methods… and each one has proven to miss the mark.

It is best to ask the customer the questions they are trying to solve, design a report that clearly answers as many of those questions as possible in one simple place.

What customers are really needing is answers to their questions:

1- Which lead source actually closes the most revenue?
2- Which campaign is converting the most leads?
3- Which sales reps is most/least effective?
4- Are my leads getting contacted?
5- Why don’t my sales close?
6- Why do my sales close?
7- Do my leads trend up?
8- Do I make money?

What are your key questions?

After careful analysis and lots of thought I have come to the conclusion that there are about 7 levels of reporting structure and value.  This model is quickly becoming part of our new book and more important the consulting model that will follow thereafter.

Level 1- Metrics: This is a simple number.  7 calls.

Level 2- Rates: This is a simple number over time.  7 calls in an hour.  This is the only way to actually compare people over time and especially helpful in comparing full time to part time reps where they work differing hours in a day.

Level 3- Ratios: This is a Rate over a Rate, like Contacts over Dials during the same period of time is a Contact Ratio.

Level 4- Trends: This is a Rate or Ratio over time.  Like Dials per hour for each day in a month, or revenue per week for each week in a quarter.

Level  5- Dispositions/Surveys: This is the only report that answers the key question of ‘Why?’ something happens.  If you follow up with every prospect that does not close and ask why they don’t, you will gain invaluable data to help you change your offering, approach, price, term, etc., based on their combined answers.

Level 6- ROI (Return on Investment): This is the number that owners and management really want.  This is cost compared to revenue.  Each dollar in buys how many dollars out?  This is most valuable for leads, sales people, offers, and marketing content because it focusses on what is most effective.  This report is very hard to get in real time when their is still time to make a difference.

Level 7-  Console/Dashboard: These are Rates, Ratios, Trends, Dispositions, or ROI in real time; while you can still do something about them.

Best Practices:

1- Strong companies invest in Level 3 reports or higher.
2- Managers or Executives think the holy grail are Trends and ROI reports in real time consoles or dashboards so they can do their jobs better and gain visibility over what their people are doing.  Wise companies give these consoles and real time dashboards to the front line sales rep so they can actually make changes during their day.

I just spent the afternoon of July 23rd and the morning of July 24th at parades.  One was Bountiful City where I grew up, and the other was the Days of ’47 Parade in Salt Lake City.

My family and I run a Hawaiian Shave Ice shack during the summer to teach our kids how to work and to help them make their own money.  We also pick some of the largest events in our area to bring a portable booth we bought at Costco and our Hawaiian Shave Ice machine.  We started this in the summer of 2008 and we have learned a lot of things real fast.  One is that you can lose money real quick trying to sell shave ice when everyone else is doing the same thing or when conditions are bad.  The other is the power of strong salespeople.

Most shave ice booths set up shop and wait for people to come to them.  They may put up a banner to get attention (advertising), or they might pass out 2 for 1 cards or buy 10 get 1 free (marketing.)  If the day is hot and there is lots of people then things work and they make sales and they will usually make a couple of hundred dollars more than the entrance fee and the health permit.  If it is rainy or cloudy you can count on losing money.

Having been in sales all of my career I immediately thought of taking our Shave Ice to the customer.  Last year we made three trays that strap over the neck and shoulder and around the waist to keep hands free and hold 20+ Shave Ice cups and syrup and we sent out two or three of my kids (and myself, I couldn’t resist) into the crowd.  We tripled our sales.  This year we wanted to expand two more.

So the question comes up, who do I hire?

In my years at Franklin Quest (now FranklinCovey) I learned that there is an extremely high correlation between successful sales reps and those who excelled in competitive athletics.  I wanted to know what made up the top 10%.  Most of them had excelled in competitive athletics or something else that was competitive.  There were two or three other significant correlations, but the athletics is the one most broad and the one easiest to apply.

The discipline of competitive athletics and the ‘will to win’ map onto sales.  I noticed this in my telecom days as a founder of UCN, Inc (now inContact).  My old football coach Mark Padgett was working at a competitive telecom company and so were Mark Blosch and several other athletes I was familiar with.  I played middle linebacker in high school and made the lightweight varsity football team at Navy (though my neck and shoulder injury that put me down my senior year reoccurred.)

The world of sales seemed to be populated with ex competive athletes from high school and college.

So I just looked around my neighborhood at the young men who I had always noticed were very strong in athletics.  I invited two of them to come sell for us at the parades.  One grew up from a family of athletes strong in baseball especially, and the other is the most intense basketball player in the area.  He lives and breaths basketball.

I then invited them both to learn from and compete with my own son, Jon.  Our business is named JonnyK’s, after my son Jon and my brother Jon (he has two shacks in Bountiful.)  I coached Jon up through the years of little league football and he is the hardest hitting middle linebacker pound-for-pound that I ever coached.  He then transferred his natural and learned athleticism to competitive rugby (he is on United Rugby, the team that placed 2nd nationally and is the only team that consistently gives Highland Rugby a run for their money).  He also trains throughout the offseason in boxing under Jay, Gene, and Don Fullmer.  He has sold Shave Ice for couple of years, but those two gave him some real challenge their first day.  Give them another year and they will be pretty good salespeople.

How did we do?  Amazing.  I won’t give numbers because I don’t want more competition in my Shave Ice business than I already have.  If you were at either one of those parades you probably saw us yellling, “Get your Shave Ice, fight global warming,” or something crazy.

My reps at InsideSales.com all seem to have excelled and achieved in their youth in the kind of things that can be picked out easily in resumes and interviews.  And whether it is weightlifting, bodybuilding, snowboarding, or ultimate fighting, they seem to continue their intense quest for personal achievement even today.