Effort Tracking for High-Leverage Sales Reps
Do you know how much work your team did today? Not just how many automated emails they sent, but real, honest-to-god work?
Activity count doesn’t tell you much. For most outbound teams, the vast majority of their activities come from mass email campaigns. And for a lot of SDRs, their whole world is launching these campaigns, fielding the replies, and booking meetings.
The best reps go one step further. Real hunters will personalize their campaigns for key leads and accounts. For a particularly high-value lead, reps will tailor every touch of the campaign for that single person.
Modern sales reps think about pipeline in terms of mass and personalized campaigns. That’s what managers should measure and optimize, not just Activity count.
Here’s a simple way to report on these efforts and how to use that data to drive results.
What Do Reps Do?
When reps sit down to build pipeline, here’s what they actually do:
- Add contacts to mass outreach campaigns
- Launch personalized campaigns
- Call people
Let’s break this down. In “Mass Outreach Campaigns”, prospects are getting generic messaging personalized with merge tags. You might also be sending out campaigns for particular triggers or verticals — webinar follow-up, for example.
In contrast, a “Personalized campaign” is tailored for a particular individual. These take longer to create, but they’re far more effective at netting responses.
Last but not least, there’s Calls. We’ll dive into call metrics on another article. For now lets stick to campaigns.
Building the Dashboards
To determine number of contacts added to campaigns, just look at which Activities are the first touch of a campaign. Build an Activity report that filters for “Touch Number” = 1. (If you use Sendbloom, be sure to add Touch Number to your Salesforce Object Field Rules).
Make it a Summary report, filter on Campaign Type, then add a chart and group by Campaign Type.
Run the report, and you’ll see a breakdown of new contacts added to campaigns. I’ve attached a report on my own activity from last week: you can see where I added a bunch of contacts to mass outreach campaigns on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, while launching Personalized Campaigns every day.
If you’re sending out different types of mass campaigns — especially ones with different CTAs, or that take more effort to create — make sure these campaigns all have the same identifier in their title. Then you can filter or bucket them in your report.
Pushing the Team to Perform
For our daily Dashboard, we run this report filtered for Personalized Campaigns launched today, grouped by rep. This, plus calls made per day, is what we push as a daily KPI. Here’s how it looks:
On the Sendbloom sales team, contacts added to mass outreach campaigns aren’t tracked as a KPI. But we do look at mass outreach on a weekly and monthly basis to see which campaigns are performing and how many meetings they generate compared to personalized campaigns.
Tracking and Driving Results
All these effort metrics are “top line” metrics — they tell you what your reps are putting in, but not what you’re getting out.
For pipeline creation, the “bottom line” you care about is meetings that result in opportunities. Our team tracks meeting bookings using Tasks: any time a meeting is booked, we create an open meeting task due on the date of the meeting. Once the meeting is held, the task is closed. This way we can dashboard the number of meetings booked every day, even if they’re far in the future.
Further up the pipe, your “bottom line” metrics are Opportunity stage advancement (more on tracking this in a future post) and of course closed revenue.
Once you have results metrics in place, look at who’s posting the best results. How many calls are they making? What’s their campaign breakdown? Check out which campaigns their opportunities come from. If they have more activity in those categories, it’s a velocity thing. But if they have less activity, then it’s a quality thing. The extra time they’re spending is paying off.
Whether it’s velocity, quality, or both, make the difference conspicuous to the team. If other reps are leaning too hard on volume, have them slow down and be more thoughtful. Share the messaging that’s earning meetings. If they’re behind on volume, give them the number to beat.
Keep an eye on everyone’s results to make sure the changes are actually helping. If you’re measuring on meetings booked, any change in effort should produce a lift within two or three weeks. If there’s no change, go back to the drawing board and pick a different area to focus on with that rep.
This, not activity tracking, is how to make a sales team great at execution.
