How do you keep score when it comes to sales? Revenue, correct? That was easy. Article complete and on with the day for everyone. I get it. After all, results are what matter when it comes to sales. Either you are hitting your numbers and you can keep your job, or you are not hitting your numbers and you must look for employment elsewhere. That’s pretty much how we live out our lives in sales. We are judged by one single number no matter how hard we try. For many people in sales, they walk from one 12-month failure to the next until they decide that sales just isn’t for them and the only other thing that they learned is to resent everything about sales. Why are we okay with this? Is there more to scoring a salesperson than revenue alone? Yes, there is. Numbers matter in every aspect of life. It is how we understand our world. It is how we learn. There are a lot more numbers to capture and study when it comes to sales. But why are other numbers important? Because the revenue tells you the ‘what’, but it never explains the ‘why’. Why is one person more successful than another? What are best practices? How can you predict success in sales? How can you recreate success and avoid the turnstile of failures through your sales organization? We have to look beyond just scoring revenue and go for the whole story.What else can be measured? Just about anything if you are willing to take the time. How many phone calls were made? How many meetings were attended? How many outbound emails were sent? How many proposals were drafted? You get the picture. Any step in the sales process is important and both can, and should be, measured. This is not a new idea either. Many sales organizations have these kinds of systems. Thou shall make 30 phone calls a day. You are expected to cold visit 10 offices a week. And so forth. Sounds fun? Nope, but that is because it’s only part of the score story. What’s missing is the concept of a balanced scorecard. The balanced scorecard concept has been around for a long time in the corporate world. It tells us that there is more than one important thing to focus on to be successful and if we want to be a highly functioning person or company, we must maintain a blend of activities and achievements. The same is quite true in sales. In B2B sales we need a balanced set of activities in the sales process to convert our pipelines into closed deals and not all sales activities are weighted equal. An email is certainly not more important than a face to face meeting with a prospect, but the email is important nonetheless. Why is tracking different sales activity so important? Even if tracking is vital, it sounds more boring and laborious than the CRM that no one is using anyway. Tracking your sales score is easy with The Scorecard Planning Tool. Sales is never a constant for anyone. Salespeople, clients and markets all run in cycles. Having a scorecard helps you to capture and understand the cycle so that you can make corrections and predictions. Therein lies the key to the kingdom. Make sales as predictable as possible and seek out process improvement for underperforming salespeople so that you can coach them back to success. We know that what gets measured gets attention and ultimately fixed. If you have been keeping score of all of your, or your team sales activity, what kind of story do you think the numbers would tell you? Would you learn the secret to your top performer’s success? Would it affirm that one of your lower performers is not pursuing enough meetings? Would it debunk your theory that it’s not that your team is not making enough phone calls, but they lack the deal closing skills to capture the most of their opportunities? Without numbers from a balanced scorecard, we would never really know. A balanced scorecard will help you to gain better efficiencies and benchmarks while making everybody’s lives easier; especially yours. Without it, you are managing and coaching sales in the dark. Dig deeper. Understand the sales process. Help your sales team instead watching them spiral in a continued tailspin. Let your team tell their activity stories with numbers that mean something instead of the hopes and promises of the dream clients that aren’t coming. A balanced sales scorecard is your tool for making sales sophisticated even for a novice. The data is there. It has always been there. You just need to capture it and put it to good use. Get the competitive advantage by learning the true functions of your sales process so you can make changes for the better. So, what is your score when it comes to sales? Find out the real story with a balanced scorecard.