Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

Those Darn Call Metrics: Reality or Fiction?

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Special note: Since this post was written, I've developed a great model for deriving metrics that makes logical sense, and can be easily customized for any company. Read it by clicking here.

Many inside sales reps today are measured on Key Performance Indicators (KPI), among which are Dials Per Day. Ken, one of our blog subscribers, mentions that he's being tasked with 50 dials per day, and asks how he can manage to call high, ask great qualification questions, and still make 50 dials in a given day. Additionally, he's mandated to get back to every inbound voicemail or lead call within one hour. Sounds tough, so let's dig in. I'll analyse it, and tell you how you can succeed through it

In an eight hour work day, a rep can realistically be expected to be on the phone six hours of that time. The rest is spent on paperwork, proposals, and in-house communications. There is also a burn-out factor that every rep experiences by being on the phone for all eight hours. Even I couldn't do it.

So if we take Ken's 50 dials, that amounts to 8.33 dials every hour, based on that six hour call day. If Ken actually has a conversation on every call, each call could only last 7.2 minutes. Furthermore, each of those calls would require at least 2 minutes of post-call data entry, lowering call time to 5.2 minutes. Even on a cold call, a rep should take two preliminary minutes to review the account being called, from a quick visit to the prospect's website to see what his or her company sells, to reviewing notes of past conversations on a warm call. Now our time per call has been lowered to 3.2 minutes, not enough time to fully qualify much of anything. Now we know that 7 people aren't actually going to answer the phone each hour. But if half of them do, and we take 15 minutes to fully qualify the prospect and two minutes for data entry, 34 minutes have elapsed and we have only 26 minutes left for the 6 dials we have left in order to meet the metrics. We have to hope, for Ken's sake, that he doesn't reach anyone in those 6 dials, or his metrics are shot.

Now that we've debunked the real-world reality of a 50 dials per day KPI, let's ask ourselves why management is enforcing this metric, and see what we can do to change it. Typically, this metric is enforced when the revenue numbers are down and call reports show that the reps are making fewer than 20 or so dials per day. Management knows that even great reps won't meet the metric, but does it in order to get reps out of lazy habits. It does tend to get call volume up, but can have a disastrous counter-effect of increasing the length of the sales cycle because leads aren't qualified (or disqualified) as well and efficiently as they should be.

My old boss Perry Lynne had an effective way of measuring metrics.  He asked each rep to log every dial per hour, and also list "lost sales," where the prospect had already bought from a competitor. He then compared the dials metric to the top rep's sales numbers (often that was me). That gave him an idea of how many dials it would take to make optimum sales numbers. Perry could have taken the top rep's dials, doubled it, set a metric, and assumed that sales would double. But he didn't because, in my case, he knew I was qualifying the heck out of every opportunity, and he didn't want to run the risk of monkeying with success. There is both an art and a science to selling. The science involves metrics, but the art involves qualifying. This nexus represents the challenge that inside sales management has to deal with every day.

So how can Ken perform as well as possible within the framework of tough metrics? Here are a few ideas. Not perfect, but as perfect as I can get it, within Ken's boundaries:

1) Spend no more than 2 minutes reviewing the prospect's website and/or previous notes before the call.

2) On inbound sales leads from lower-level prospects, call high instead. You may reach an administrative assistant, but he or she can get you through to someone high enough that it's a better call than starting low. Your sale will progress faster there, and let her transfer you, because the call will be coming from an exec's office, the other party can see that on the phone display, and chances are he or she will pick up your call instead of ignoring it than if you dial cold, which sometimes happens. If he or she doesn't refer you, go back to the original lead, and call that person. That's 2 dials right there.

3) You've got to qualify or disqualify the prospect really fast. Use these six qualification question types we teach in our telesales training courses to ensure that you've gotten everything, and don't forget to get your prospect's official title right up front, so you'll know how valuable your information really is:

a) Timeframe: When do you have to have a solution on board?

b) Requirements: What does your ideal solution look like?

c) Business/Consequences: Tell me a little about your business, how the solution will positively affect your bottom line, and describe the consequences of not moving forward with it.

d) Scope: How many people/departments/lines of business will need this solution?

e) Decision Tree: How does the decision process work for getting the solution on board?

f) Budget: Is the solution budgeted? If not, what is the process for establishing a budget?

In a perfect world, you'd want to get the prospect to elaborate on all of those questions, and a good rep like Ken will probably do it anyway. If he does, his metrics will go down, but he'll increase sales, and overshoot his quota. He and his company will make a lot of money. And I don't think his manager will give him too much grief for not hitting the metrics.

Being the top earner in your department always gives you leeway with management. In a future blog post, I'll elaborate on the questioning methodology in item #3 above, because it works every time, and it's fast. Add it to your Best Practices playbook. And good luck with the metrics.