Customer-Action-Based Sales Metrics

How to measure sales performance: by customer actions. In the end, what you want is for the customer to take an action (buy, sign up, create an account, etc.). In some sales processes, there are multiple steps that must be taken to get the customer from zero to buying, and the customer must take an action at each of those steps. Unless you have very lazy salespeople, it doesn't make sense to measure their actions, because they should always be doing what's necessary to move a client down the pipeline. (And even if they aren't, that will be shown by bad conversion rates in customer actions.)

An exception to this is the first contact, whether that's a cold call or some sort of referral contact. First contact attempts by the salespeople should be measured because , but beyond that customer action is what matters.

I worked at Qualtrics on the academic sales team for a while, where I made outbound cold calls to professors and attempted to set demos with them. The sales process looked like this:

1. Call
2. Set demo
3. Do demo with professor
4. Get professor to set up a demo with the decision-maker (usually the dean or dept chair)
5. Do demo with decision maker (and then other professors if dean wasn't convinced)
6. Close the deal

You can see that each milestone in the process (minus the first one) involved a customer action. First, a professor had to schedule a time for a demo. Then, he / she had to participate in a demo. Then, he /she had to give a recommendation to the decision maker. And on and on.

At the end of each step lies a customer action, and that's really what should be measured.

http://amacus.net/blog/2011/01/measure-your-sales-productivity-by-your-customers-actions/