How do you measure worth in your sales team? By the number of calls, the size of your prospect list or is it the depth of the relationship with the customer? Is it a calendar stuffed with meetings or a funnel that is as top heavy as it is bottom heavy?

Forbes Magazine still measures a CEO by his or her Net Worth. But is a billionaire worth more than any kid who has a quarter in his pocket?

Why do we still have beauty pageants where women are measured and weighed like cattle?

Isn’t it time that we look at the way we measure worth in our culture and then look at the way we measure our sales team to see if our perceptions are as skewed as the examples above.

When I work with clients who boast they have thousands of names in their database, my first question is – who are they and when was the last time you contacted them?

Numbers alone do not show health of a company or a sales team. Here’s an example of numbers meaning NOTHING:

Two years ago when we started doing Webinars we decided to try a sales strategy that is counter-intuitive to the way we have done business for over the past dozen years:  A true email BLAST to (not kidding) ONE MILLION recipients.

We notified our online credit card company to expect a huge influx of credit card payments, we geared up our Marketing Director, Kevin Elam, to watch for a surge of web traffic, then we anxiously watched the online ‘ticker’ that showed the emails going out and the number of opens and click-throughs.  Heady stuff.

Except we did not get one sign up to our Webinar.
Our web traffic did not increase.
But our spam did.

Not to be dismayed – we called the company that rented us this list (this email blast was NOT cheap!) and demanded a resend! They quickly obliged and sent the blast again…and again. With the same results – zip, zilch – nada.

What did we learn? Our tried and true method of marketing is still and always will be the best:  Targeted and Direct.

Same with our sales management style - we are no longer impressed with sales reports that show hundreds of calls or a calendar chock full of meetings.  It’s of course, the results that truly matter. But our unit of measurement of RESULTS has always been and now, always will be:

Do our customers know how grateful we are for their business? Do they feel well served? Have we done our job well and made them feel as though they were the only customer on our mind today?

That’s our unit of measurement – what’s yours?