As we told you last week1, a business model is not fixed in time. On the contrary, its ambition is to evolve and improve: indeed, your customers change, working methods change, your company changes, your salespeople change... Finally, as you will have understood, your entire environment evolves - and consequently - your business model must also evolve to remain relevant.
How to analyze my model?
If you have followed our series from the beginning, you are applying your sales model to the letter in your CRM. This also means that all the data painstakingly collected during this period is centralized and usable.
And precisely, you "only" have to exploit this data!
Following the definition of your business model, you were able to define the indicators to follow in order to know the impact of the actions implemented, make relevant adjustments and strengthen the success factors. You will therefore need one or more dashboards to have a precise view of these different indicators.
Ideally, you should have a CRM tool that allows you to customize these dashboards to highlight the analyses you need. Fortunately, with Koban, for example, you can customize your dashboards with the necessary indicators.
Perform a daily analysis.
As KESTIO mentioned in the previous article, the goal is not to analyze your entire business model every day and make significant changes in the first week of implementation.
But still, we like to have a daily view of the main indicators (KPIs), just in case.
These "flash figures," as we like to call them at Koban, are a good alternative. They represent the KPIs that you decide to track daily: number of opportunities won, number of opportunities lost, time spent, conversion rate, costs of opportunities, etc. They are calculated automatically and in real time. And very often, it is at this precise moment that we are very happy to have invested in a CRM (those who have experienced pivot tables will understand!).
The little bonus in all of this? You can display these flash figures right on your homepage (among other places), which allows you to have a direct view by monitoring the proper execution of your business model on a daily basis and to be very reactive in adjusting elements with low impact, if needed.
These indicators can be both common or individual to measure the performance of each of your sales representatives. This is very important as a manager.
These indicators also allow you to manage your sales model on a daily basis and implement small corrective actions before it's too late. For example, you notice that your sales representative X is very far from his monthly targets. You can then schedule time with him to manage him and understand what is "holding him back."
Conduct a more in-depth analysis - The "ANALYSIS" Module.
Beyond daily monitoring, you can – in fact, you must – manage and evaluate sales effectiveness and the sales effort provided by the company (in other words, your business model). To do this, your CRM will once again be your best friend.
Let's take the example of Koban and its specific analysis module. It allows you, among other things, to analyze all your data by creating personalized dashboards: pie charts, curves, tables, histograms, etc.
You can analyze almost everything very easily. More comprehensive than flash figures, dashboards really allow you to highlight relevant analyses: what worked in your model / what worked less well / which segment generates the most revenue / a summary table of sales for each of your sales representatives, etc. Because just as "working a lot" does not necessarily mean "earning money", it is necessary for any company, small or large, to calculate the effectiveness and profitability of its commercial actions in order to focus effort on the best actions.
But remember, your CRM isn't just for managing sales activities; it's also for your marketing efforts to generate qualified leads for your sales team. This data should be an integral part of your analysis to identify areas for improvement and optimization, such as the conversion rate of leads from marketing, the number of prospects generated by marketing, etc. The goal is to compare all sales and marketing data to identify areas for improvement.
Let's not forget that the goal of all this is to evolve your business model.
We cannot stress enough that a business model is forged over time through experience and feedback. It will never be fixed. Hence the importance of having a tool that centralizes all your data and allows you to keep the history in order to compare and challenge the data. This is how you will improve performance, and consequently, increase revenue.
Key indicators not to be missed
Well, obviously too many indicators kill the indicators. The risk is getting lost in a pile of useless studies and not coming up with any relevant analysis. With KESTIO, we have selected the indicators that you must - at a minimum - follow if you want to extract relevant analyses. Of course, other indicators will need to be added depending on your environment and organization:
-
CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST
This one is truly The must-have!
Customer acquisition cost is the average amount spent to convert a prospect into a customer. This investment can include marketing expenses as well as the cost of time spent by the sales representative to convert the prospect into a customer.
Your business model is largely based on the customer segments to prioritize in order to generate the most margin. But to do this, you have to take into account the cost of customer acquisition.
Indeed, if I realize that my "Gold" clients cost me almost as much money as they bring in (because I have a high acquisition cost), this may lead me to review certain elements of my business model: if, at the same time, my "Silver" clients are certainly less interesting in terms of "pure" revenue, but cost me almost nothing in acquisition compared to what they bring me (thanks to a low acquisition cost), this ultimately makes them more interesting than expected...
What do I do? Clearly, we would be tempted to switch the "Gold" clients to "Silver" and vice versa.
Understand that your "GOLD" clients may have had a lower acquisition cost when your business model was set up, but again, the environment evolves as well as your costs... Hence the importance of analyzing your model after a certain time and implementing appropriate corrective actions.
-
SALES EFFORT BY TARGET
This indicator allows you to optimize your sales representatives' time. Thanks to it, you can judge the effort of each sales representative on a type of target. You can also make a comparison between your sales representatives, to see who allocates their effort best. This is not to "monitor" your sales representatives. But it is interesting to know, for example, that sales representative A has made an average of 10 physical appointments on a target while sales representative B has made 15 for the same result.
Beyond that, it allows you to identify the targets on which your sales representatives are allocating far too much effort for little result and, conversely, those for which you are not devoting enough effort. As a result, you can adjust your business model accordingly (if necessary).
-
SALES CONVERSION RATE
The conversion rate helps identify the performance of a salesperson or team in converting a prospect into a customer.
You can not only analyze the overall conversion rate (i.e., for all your sales representatives), but also the individual conversion rate (i.e., sales representative by sales representative). Again, this is not to "spy" on your sales representatives, but rather to identify the sources that hinder development and thus implement appropriate actions.
-
AVERAGE BASKET PER ACCOUNT TYPE
The average basket defines the average amount spent by each customer. This indicator can be tracked per order or for a given period, for the entire lifetime of the customer. It allows you to identify on which customer segment the average purchase basket is the highest, for example – or conversely – on which customer segment the average purchase basket is the lowest.
-
NUMBER OF OPPORTUNITIES CREATED
The number of opportunities created is a simple indicator to track the effectiveness of marketing and sales.
Indeed, a high number of opportunities created will reflect several things:
- Marketing generates a lot of qualified leads
- And/or do your salespeople have opportunities with existing clients or through a channel other than marketing (word-of-mouth, client recommendations, etc.)?
In short, your sales and marketing teams are well aligned and doing a good job!
On the contrary, a small number of opportunities created will force you to analyze other indicators. In particular, where do the opportunities come from?
Do they come from marketing or from the sales representatives themselves?
As a result, you'll know which channel to focus on to generate more opportunities.
Again, this list is by no means exhaustive (we are thinking in particular of indicators linked to margin!). These are "standard" indicators that any company can analyze to develop its business model. But there will obviously be other indicators to take into account depending on your internal strategy and your environment.
So, we've reached the end of this joint series between Koban and KESTIO... We hope you enjoyed it and, above all, that these articles have helped you! In any case, we have greatly enjoyed combining our skills and visions to offer you a complete and operational methodology.
And to go further, we have even more surprises in store for you very soon, including a summary white paper and a webinar to discuss the topic with you live and answer your questions directly!
To learn more about CRMs and help you with your projects, find all of our methods and tools here:
1 : Did you miss the previous episodes? Don't panic! Treat yourself to a little catch-up session:
Article 1: What is a business model and how do you build one?
Article 2: How to translate your sales strategy into a CRM tool?
Article 3: 3 key points for building an effective business model
Article 4: Structuring and optimizing your business model in your CRM
Article 5: How to effectively deploy your business model
KESTIO and KOBAN, it's a partnership that feels natural: the former supports SMEs in their commercial development through an online sales coaching platform for leaders, managers and sales representatives; the latter helps them to effectively deploy their strategy and commercial actions by generating maximum ROI, via a high-performance CRM solution.
From this meeting was born an idea (which became a desire, then a reality): to combine our skills and visions to support you in defining and implementing your business model!
