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Making the Number: How to Use Sales Benchmarking to Drive Performance | 
 enlarge | Authors: Greg Alexander, Aaron Bartels, Mike Drapeau
Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $14.25
You Save: $15.70 (52%)
New (38) Used (8) from $12.00
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 35205
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.2 x 1
ISBN: 1591842174
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.81
EAN: 9781591842170
ASIN: 1591842174
Publication Date: October 16, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The essential tool kit to achieve breakthrough sales performance improvements.
Numbers don t lie: 40 percent of all salespeople miss their targets each year. How can sales managers ensure their teams are doing everything possible? The key lies in benchmarking, which is not new for finance or manufacturing but rarely gets applied to sales. Making the Number will teach executives to embrace data-driven decision making and rely less on gut instinct.
Comparing a sales force to those of relevant peers leads to many opportunities to improve performance. The authors take readers through their five-step methodology for sales benchmarking, showing how to select metrics; gather, compute, and compare internal and external data; and then actually use the data.
Making the Number includes case studies of sales benchmarking in action. For example, find out how Discover Financial Services plays David to the Goliaths of MasterCard and Visa.
Whether you re a sales rep, a manager, or a CEO, this book will show you a better way to make your number.
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| Customer Reviews:
 From Art to Science - finally! October 28, 2008
Reg Nordman (Vancouver, BC Canada)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book should take sales from Art to Science. This is a very comprehensive work which any sales manager looking to make a difference in the next 10 years, should read and start to implement. If you are also looking at top grading for sales, then this is a book you will need to learn from. The authors website has published a list of sample data to help you get started on benchmarking. Its illuminating to see where some of the "top" 100 companies actually come out.
They do a good job of isolating the various dependencies in sales.
Dependencies
1. Industry segment
2. Geographical areas
3. Sales channels
4. Sales force organization
5. Public, private, NGO
6. History.
Then they give a sample of data required in each category of sales such as:
1. Account planning - churn rate, lifetime value, customer share
2. Budgeting - break-even, gap to goal, net income/rep, return on sales
3. Channel - Outside sales contribution, outbound lead ration
4. Comp- sales quota attainment, total available income, variable comp rates
5. Expense - cost of advertising, cost of marketing, cost of sales, cost per rep.
6. management - Sales quota/sale, sales productivity/rep, forecast accuracy, pipeline ratio
7. methods - sales activities to close sale, sales cycle length, deal size
8. staff - ramp time to full productivity, sales rep/manager ratio, sales rep/ sales support ratio
9. talent - turnover rate, interview pool needed, sourcing pool needed, time to backfill a rep
10. infrastructure - sales growth rate, CRM/SFA utilization, lead source utilization, mobile utilization
11. territory - close rate, customer acquisition cost, customers /rep, potential leads /rep
12. training - budget, training hours per rep.
They break out sales types into an interesting six categories
1. Delivery
2. Order taking
3. Missionary
4. Technician
5. Demand creator
6. Solution provider
This is a very useful book which could help save your job if you are a VP Sales and its tough going. The job is not easy , but this is a terrific way to help you manage. A bonus is the epilogue where they describe sales peering. Visualize a souped up Linkedin Questions all about best practices and benchmarking sales. Something really needed.
 Why and how you should use benchmarking to improve the level and quality of your sales October 17, 2008
Craig Matteson (Ann Arbor, MI)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book for any manager and executive (or even any salesperson) concerned with the performance of their sales organization. The authors show you why benchmarking your sales team is important and can be a powerful tool in helping you not only understand the hows and whys of your team's performance, but on where your team needs to go and how to get there.
The book comes in five sections: Section one discusses what sales really is and all that is involved. You are also reminded about the importance of your customers and the experience you provide for them. I think you will also enjoy the chapters on what improving sales performance provides for executives and the individual salesperson. You are then introduced to what benchmarking is and the basics of what it involves.
Section two discusses what you need to do benchmarking for your sales team. The authors also take you through processes sales, strategic sales, and best practices. A chapter discusses why you want to be a world class sales team and another shows you what a self-aware sales team looks like and how it functions.
Section three shows you the five steps to making your benchmarking effective. They are getting the right metrics, collecting the right data, comparing and contrasting your team to those you are benchmarking against, deciding on focused action, and sustaining your efforts at improvement. Section four provides a call to action and shows you how to overcome objections to benchmarking, how to overcome implementation difficulties, and how to move forward with your benchmarking plans. Section five provides five case studies that illustrate the various points made in the text.
I think this text can help you understand your present sales performance more clearly and what you need to do to improve your performance to reach new heights. This is the kind of practically minded book with a real focus that I enjoy reading and recommending.
Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
Solid information October 16, 2008
Charles Decker (New York, NY)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have been following Greg Alexander's career from afar for some time now. I am pleased that he has been able to put together the essence of his learnings so succinctly in a book. I used to run the largest business book club in the world and know how starved both sales managers and their reps are for solid, case-based data on just what helps seal the sale. Sales benchmarking may sound a little too 'out there', but I think readers will find lots of "Aha!' moments throughout the book. I also feel marketing people, financial types, and even CEOs will appreciate the information and practical advice this book offers. I sometimes felt bad offering so many sales management titles to my book club members, but they often told me that if they got just ONE good idea from a book they were happy. I think they'll get at least one good idea per *chapter* from this one. My advice is download it to your Kindle ASAP. I did.
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