Get Your Salespeople to Actually Put Data into Salesforce.com

A good sales person wants to hunt and they don’t want to spend their precious selling time inputting data.  But sales managers need the data to measure the sales person.  So what should a sales team do?  Make it easy on the sales person to input the data and the sales manager to report the data.

Create an internal rule for your sales team that if the opportunity is not in Salesforce then it doesn’t exist.  This is the easiest to enforce on your sales people and thus measuring closed opportunities is an easy report for sales managers to create and view.  But sales mangers want to see trends and sales activities throughout the week. Salesforce allows for sales people to input and complete tasks/activities that are associated with leads, accounts and opportunities but the problem is sales people don’t want to input this data.  So everything gets outdated, trends are hard to calculate and sales reports are old and stale.

A potential solution is a weekly point system.  Sales people like competition so besides competing on closed revenue have sales people compete for weekly points and use Salesforce as your scoreboard.  Points are calculated against completed tasks/activities.  For example, a Call = 1 point, a Meeting = 6 points, a signed contract = 20 points.  Create as many points as you’d like.  At Galvin we have 10 different possible activities to obtain points.  At the end of the week see who wins.  Then, create a minimum weekly point total (at Galvin ours is 110 minimum points per week).  If a sales person doesn’t meet the minimum points per week then that means they are not working and it is time for the sales manager to take appropriate action.

We use the point system for the Galvin sales team and it creates good friendly competition.  But it also makes sure that our sales people are generating revenue.