Feature Articles

For most sales managers, the daily emphasis is on making the numbers and doing it cost effectively.

• What’s the number of contacts, presentations, and sales per agent (or sales per hour for telemarketing)?
• What’s our list penetration?
• What’s our cost per sale?

While these are critical metrics, it’s a good practice for sales managers to look at other metrics as well, including those that measure the quality of their sales. To understand the big picture, sales teams need to work closely with service vendors, enrollment processing operations, and customer care.

A good practice is to work with your TPV vendor to set up decision rules and reports ahead of time. Many vendors offer web-based, real-time access to field data by agents and reports high-lighting daily activity. Reports should include metrics such as the number of TPV attempts per sale and the number of “no-sale” TPV attempts, with the reason for the TPV failure tracked as well. Tracking statistics like this on a per-agent level, sales agent attendance, and daily sales can give you a more accurate picture of what’s going on in the field.

Decision rules, once established, can be programmed into your vendor’s TPV system to alert you (or put an immediate stop) to problems such as multiple attempts at verification for the same account, duplicate phone numbers, mixed language usage (prohibited in §25.473) or other common verification scams.

Another step REPs can take to measure sales channel performance is implementing quality call-backs on a percentage of sales. Doing this can provide insight into the sales process and sales agents’ behavior. An outside vendor or your customer care department can perform quality calls.

For larger companies with customer acquisition, customer retention, and marketing operations in different areas, sales managers may need access to the metrics that give them the counterpoint to gross sales.

These include:

1. Processing rejects due to data integrity issues
2. Cancelations tracked by number of days since enrollment
3. Cancellations and complaints per agent
4. Net customers on flow by channel

Information like this can highlight operational issues in your sales channel. For example, if a telemarketing agent has significantly higher cancellation rates than the channel norm, a sample audit of their sales, authorization, and verification recordings may be in order.

Data from your customer care center should include qualitative feedback on complaints and cancellations, along with general statistics. This information can help you root out sales agents who make quick sales but provide inaccurate or incomplete information, damaging your relationship with customers and putting your company at risk for PUCT fines.

If you have outsourced telemarketing, field sales, or other marketing operations, someone internal to your company should maintain quality stats on each vendor. There’s an old saying, “What gets measured gets managed.” Make sure your sales organization is measuring – and managing – all the right things.