Every now and then, we all find ourselves stepping onto the scale, but most of the times we don’t like what we see.  How great it would be if we could stand there and just by commanding “Lower!”, the number would immediately obey and do as it is told to.  Regrettably, this doesn’t happen in real life, as this is a metric that is beyond our control. 

Moving on to Sales, we always say that we must “make our number”, as if we believe that results such as Revenue, Market Share and Profit can be directly controlled.  Obviously, this is not the case, but we often believe that we can manage sales turnover, manage profit etc. 

With regards to the above, in his book “Cracking the Sales Management Code”, Jason Jordan points out that: “People can only manage people and resources, not concepts or numbers”.  So, since we cannot control numbers, what is that we can manage?  Thankfully, we can control and keep track of our day-to-day activities and have metrics for them.  For instance, going back to the scale, if we want to lose weight, we can monitor the number of calories that we consume or the number of hours that we exercise daily.

Likewise, in a Sales organisation we can include various metrics such as the percentage of qualified opportunities.  Although, we may not be able to directly manage Hit Rate, if our sales representatives qualify all opportunities based on defined criteria, then they will be focusing on more “winnable” projects, so it is most probable that our Hit Rate is going to increase.  The same process can be applied to other Sales results and the Sales activities that are linked to them.       

Therefore, as the same book suggests, it is evident that we need to understand the causal relationships between results and activities.  Once we do that, then by applying reverse engineering and introducing relevant activity metrics, we will have made ourselves a “road map” that will help us to “make our number”.

So, the next time that you step onto the scale, just remember: “It is only a number!”