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Sales and marketing requires constant diagnostic tuning if you want to stay at peak performance. How do you maximize the use of your sales and marketing (SAM) tracking software to become more profitable and effective? Here are a few tips.

Run reports and set benchmarks.

Reporting is your best tool for measuring for improvement. If you don’t constantly measure for improve- ment, you can’t determine if things are getting better or worse and identify if you’re making progress toward your goals. It’s amazing how a little time spent analyzing your performance statistics from different angles can form a completely new picture.

Only measure for relevant results.

Measure those activities or results that are most important to successfully achieving your organization’s goals—

these are your key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI will only be of value, however, if there’s a way to accurately define and track it. One example could be: “Decrease cancellations by 0.05 % monthly until we sustain a 4% cancellation threshold”, or “Increase VPG on married couples under age 30 by ‘x’ amount”. With today’s software choices, look for a solution that offers many sales reporting capabilities, so you can report on the life cycle of a tour from every perspective. Today’s sales and marketing (SAM) technology can almost predict your agents’ effectiveness for a day of the week and their best tour time of that day, based on historical patterns.

Measure activities you may have overlooked.

There is a ton of profit in the details. Analyze components of the

tour’s life cycle you may not have considered before. Category by category, you can measure both success and failures by a far wider range of variables and criteria than previously available. You can filter by date range first and then run a report that shows trending. Daily, monthly, and week- by-week comparative reports should be grouped by as many measurable variables as possible that impact the tour, such as gift, OPC, liner, closer, VLO, tour times, product types, sale status (penders, cancellations, funded), and more.

Overcome your biggest obstacle: software avoidance.

Simplify your SAM reporting so that it is not overly complicated to use, or your organization will avoid it like the plague. Have the “report expert” train your staff on the simplest ones first, to acclimate them to running reports frequently. These reports will help them understand the impact of marketing decisions and increase the company’s bottom line. Give them tools to achieve higher effectiveness they will actually use. Today’s SAM software can permit every person in your organization limited access to measure themselves for performance while protecting sensitive data proprietary to the developer.

Measure twice, cut once.

Use your SAM reporting program to discover which actions or teams are effective and which are not, looking for patterns over time. Implement training sessions where you can use examples of this information to pose interesting questions and challenge the staff to use the software to identify a specific success or failure point. Examples would be: “Who can tell me what our strongest tour time is by VPG?” or “Identify the conversion rates of pending sales to processable by our two highest closers.” It then becomes easier to find a way to reproduce that desired result.

In today’s challenging economic times, we can take existing budgets and extract far more revenue from the existing marketing dollar when we mine the data we already have to help us pinpoint and focus on our strengths.

Distribute this info to appropriate personnel.

Effective sales and marketing software is able to provide all this information and more, to everyone that wants to measure for improvement. A common pitfall and obstacle to maximizing your SAM investment is failing to disseminate the gold mine to be found in your data to the right people. Many companies provide on-demand access to reports that are real time and Web-based, filtered by log-on. Certain information needs to be accessible to those

most capable of affecting change. This might mean opening some of the reporting from top to bottom in a limited way even for agents, rather than leaving it only for “C” level executives and directors.

It’s a highly competitive market out there. Using your sales and marketing software properly provides your staff easy opportunities to improve in specific areas that used to be hard to measure and track. If you’re not empowering your staff to use the software to its fullest capabilities, you’re leaving money on the table every time. Let’s raise the bottom line.

Todd is CEO of TrackResults Software. His e-mail is todd@trackresults.net.