How to Use Sales Funnel Metrics to Motivate SDRs

In marketing, people say, “Content is king.”

In management, it is context.

My first job in sales was as a church missionary. We knocked doors in Munich, Germany — countless doors. When someone answered the door, we mustered our best German to try to convince people we had a message that could be useful to their lives.

Needless to say, most of the people we met in Munich were doing “just fine, thank you very much.”

If our leaders had focused on “number of doors knocked,” we would have surely burned out and looked for any reason not to knock another door.

But they did not. They focused on the joy our message would bring to people, how their lives could change for the good, and how we could make a difference for the few choice souls who embraced what we had to offer.

And so we knocked — dozens of doors, six days a week, for two years. And the success came.

These same principles apply in enterprise sales.

A lesson in sales acceleration

Right now, the XANT Momentum team has a group working with an inside sales team at a high-profile company on a sales acceleration project.

As you might guess, the goal is more sales — in this case, 30% more.

And, of course, the way to more sales is more at bats, which means more calls.

But these reps are millennials. If you try to force them to make more dials, they will get burned out and look for any reason not to pick up the phone.

On this project, we rediscovered the magic of “context.” Instead of focusing on “more dials,” we focused on helping them understand the context within which they were working.

We were convinced that if they understood their own individual funnel metrics fully, they would have intrinsic motivation to move the funnel along as fast as possible.

In order to establish this context, we developed a simple calculator for each rep, showing their historical funnel in living color:

Dials -> Conversations -> SQLs (appointments) -> SQOs

Using the shaded cells, reps could play around with the metrics they could impact — and see what the results could be.

We used this as a coaching tool with the reps, encouraged them to experiment with it, and focused their attention on “SQOs”— the metric they get paid on. We then set goals with them, and measured based on these goals.

The coaching sessions could perhaps be more accurately termed “context” sessions. We weren’t trying to get reps to dial more per se.

We were trying to get them to understand how their funnel works, betting that as they understood the whole context of their funnel, they would opt — out of their own best interest — to improve the things they could, so they could hit their quota.

The results?

• +35% in dials
• +32% in SQLs
• +25% in SQOs

Reps are happy, managers are happy, and everyone is operating in an environment where they understand the full context of the work they are doing and how it is producing results.

Momentum is XANT’s premier services offering, reserved for organizations who require the highest level of focus on business outcomes. Momentum works with sales leadership to design and deliver Sales Transformation programs, including people, processes & systems.

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