By Mike Donaldson, Director Business Development, BillboardPlanet
Managing a sales staff has never been a simple task, regardless of whether you have 2 or 20 salespeople. They are unique, creative people, many times not detail oriented and solely focused on closing and commissions. I write from a position of experience as I was one many moons ago and have managed a large number of sales people across six countries.
The pandemic has only added complexity to this as now we have more people working from home, more virtual meetings and in many cases skewed historical sales numbers for comparison.
Most companies review sales performance based on monthly, quarterly and yearly revenue targets and the quotas each salesperson was given based on these company goals using a graph similar to the one below.
This is the right way to manage a company’s long-term performance, but does not always help in managing a sales team on a daily or weekly basis. If you are only looking at monthly reports you are limited to reactive sales management. By the time the monthly close arrives and you are able to review your company’s performance it is too late to change revenue results. You are stuck with changes that can only take affect the following month.
A possible solution for this is a focus on your Booked Revenue.
Booked Revenue gives you a true pulse of your sales team’s daily or weekly activities and achievements with actionable data giving you time for adjustments. We have all heard the saying that “Hindsight is 20/20” but seldom do people offer a way for you to go back in time and improve. We always hear, “if I had better information” or “If I had more time, I am sure I would have made better decisions”.
So what is this magical Booked Revenue I am referring to? Booked Revenue is the sum of the total value all the contracts that have been closed during a day or week, regardless of the exposition dates. Whether a signed contact, confirmation email or a Purchase Order from an ad agency, these are all of the commitments that a salesperson received during the week.
By using a system like Quantum from BillboardPlanet, you can use a report such as the one below to compare how much was Booked in Total Contact Value during the week to previous periods. This relative comparison is key to get a true understanding of the results. You will quickly see how much each member of your sales team brought to the table on a weekly basis no matter whether they are in the office, working from home or traveling. You will not necessarily know how much you will have in revenue this month, but you will absolutely see the results of sales efforts early enough in the month to be able to adjust and push in the right places.
Out-of-Home is moving faster than ever. Making sure you have the right metrics and tools to be able to manage a unique group of people who are key to your success is of vital importance.
Imagine being able to see how many contracts were closed today, by whom and for what contract value and compare it to previous periods – in real-time.
What would you do with this insight?
Would you be able to remove the saying “Hindsight is 20/20” from your vocabulary?
I understand each plant is different and managed in a way that makes your company unique. Although, I am unable to get into the weeds on how to use the results of this report in a short article, I am more than happy to discuss it in more detail.
This is just one example of the automation tools available to help you manage your plant more efficiently. We bring decades of experience and state-of-the-art technology to help you evolve and run your plant better while never compromising what makes you unique.
Mike is an industry veteran focused on using technology to bring optimization to OOH plants. For more information about Quantum, please reach out to him at michael@billboardplanet.com or visit the BillboardPlanet website, www.billboardplanet.com.
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