Revenue per dial and revenue per meeting are valuable but underutilized sales metrics for top-line sales and marketing strategy. In short, they tell you how much money is brought in per dial made and per meeting booked. These numbers are tremendously useful, yet most Sales VPs don’t employ them because they are so hard to calculate. How can these important metrics benefit your company’s bottom line, and how do you calculate them?
For Sales VPs
Revenue/Dial and Revenue/Meeting numbers helps you gauge how much revenue each sales rep contributes based on their output. You can use this information to analyze cost vs. value of your reps. Say you calculate Meetings/Revenue for one of your inbound sales reps and find he books about 2 deals per month worth about $4,000 each, and his salary is $100,000 per year. In other words, he’s bringing in $96k while costing you $100k. Time to rework your compensation plan so you don’t lose money in the long-term.
For Sales Managers
Analyzing the cost vs. value of your reps is also useful for sales managers, who can use these numbers to assess their reps’ performance. If your highly paid sales reps are sourcing fewer deals per month then their salary makes them worth, then you need to invest some serious time in sales coaching. Research shows that coaching each rep for 3+ hours per month causes them to exceed their goals by 7% on average. On average, reps that are coached 0-3 hours per month fall short of their goals by 8-10%.
Sales managers also benefit from knowing revenue per meeting booked because they can use it to assess the quality of their reps’ meetings with potential customers. By digging deep into a low Revenue/Meeting result, you can determine whether the issues come from qualifying bad opportunities or from poor execution in the meetings themselves.
For Marketing Managers
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) managers might use these metrics to identify how the sales team is working the leads coming from marketing. The sales team receives these MQLs from marketing and has to accept and qualify them before progressing them into the opportunity pipeline. How much is each sales rep’s effort on MQLs worth? From this number, an MQL manager can determine how effective cooperation between the sales and marketing team is regarding MQLs.
If your Revenue/Meeting number is low, your company might need to invest more in marketing to increase inbound meetings, which tend to have higher conversion rates. Or perhaps your company should put a “Buy Now” button on your website so the outbound sales team doesn’t need to touch every opportunity in the pipeline.
The takeaway: if your Revenue/Dial or Revenue/Meeting numbers are small, your business model needs to change.
How to calculate these metrics
Calculating Revenue/Dial and Revenue/Meeting is a nightmare of numbers and Excel spreadsheets. The truth is, analytics software (like InsightSquared) is by far your best option for quickly and accurately working them out. Most executives and managers choose not to analyze these numbers because it would be too complicated and time-consuming to compute them – but being aware of what they are could affect the way you run your business. Choose analytics software to efficiently model a smart business.
