Laura’s Winning Ideas

Surely, everyone who reads this blog is also measuring results of your activities…(I can hear my husband in the background, “Hey! quit calling me Shirley!”…his corny humor is like the sound of running water, necessary to life.)

According to a survey by the CMO Council and described in the Marketing ROI blog, the numbers aren’t good.

For proposals, the hit rate should be collected and dissected so you can watch performance by sector / sales division / geographic territory and any other meaningful portions in your organization.

Proposal professionals should capture their own metrics. Your hit rate should reflect that part of the sales cycle under your responsibility. Track your proposal performance at the next step, whether that is award, interview, best and final, negociation or selection. If you participate in preparations for the interview, track those metrics as well. There are different tools that can be polished for oral presentations and interviews, so I watch performance in this area separately. Then I can plan where to to spend time and money improving skills.

When you measure performance, you can see your progress if you are installing a system, or weaknesses when a market shift weakens your performance. If you don’t track things, you are just a cog in the sales process.

When you track performance you avoid a trap Jill Konrath calls “drive-by-selling.” For sales people, drive-by-selling occurs when they make the sale and then never follow-up with the customer to check on on whether they made a difference and track how things are going. How can you be confident your sales recommendation is on track, if you never follow up?

Same goes for proposal teams. You should routinely follow up for progress on the sale for which you wrote the proposal. What feedback have they gotten from the intial reading? What was the final result? When is the de-brief with the proposal recipient and can you see the de-brief notes?