To determine whether salespeople are investing their time in the correct activities, review their daily calendars on a regular basis. Are they performing all of the activities that are listed in their Prospecting Plans? (See : How to Develop an Effective Prospecting Plan.) What proportion of their time are they investing in each activity? What quantity of each activity are they performing?
Many salespeople don’t have an effective means of tracking their daily activities in enough detail to provide accurate answers to these questions. One way to solve this problem is by using an activity tracking form. To construct an activity tracking form, begin by listing key daily activities in the left-hand column of a worksheet. Then, put the days of the week across the top.
Be sure to break activities down into a sufficient number of steps to make meaningful data analysis possible. For example, if you want to determine why a salesperson’s cold calls are not producing the desired number of appointments, include the following activities in the tracking form: (1) the number of times the salesperson dials the phone; (2) the number of times they actually talk to someone; and (3) the number of appointments they book. Inspect each of these activities in sequence, and look at the ratios between the numbers. If the salesperson is only making two “dials” a day, the problem is pretty obvious. If the number of “dials” is acceptable, but the salesperson is not getting enough “talks” or “appointments”, they may need to improve their cold calling script, or practice to make their delivery more natural.
Each time a salesperson performs any of the activities that are listed on their tracking form, they should make a tick mark in the appropriate box. At the end of the day or week, they should total up the tick marks. The data produced by this simple discipline can be a great aid in troubleshooting performance issues.
Are you thinking, “I won’t be able to get my salespeople to fill out an activity tracking form”? If your sales compensation plan is 100-percent commission, you are probably right. However, if your sales compensation plan includes some type of income floor, then you have every right to hold your salespeople accountable for completing a tracking form. After all, how much time does it take to make a tick mark in a box? If a salesperson makes fifty tick marks a day, how much of their time is consumed by making tick marks? The value to both management and salespeople of the information collected via activity tracking forms far outweighs the “time cost” of completing the forms.