To Succeed in Sales, You Need a Sales Scorecard

If you’re not getting the sales you want (or your boss wants), look at the sales activities that drive results. Are you doing the right things? Are you doing enough of them?

You’ll never know if you don’t keep score. In this blog post, you will learn how to create a sales scorecard to track your activities.

When you document how you’re spending your time, you can modify your sales activities to become more productive and close more sales.

What Drives Your Business?

To build your sales scorecard, first determine which activities generate business for you. What are your performance drivers?

Here is a partial list of standard business development activities organized by “Prospecting,” “Networking,”, and “Awareness.”

• Prospecting involves actively contacting target companies.
• Networking generates referrals.
• Awareness creates visibility so that prospects contact you.

Salespeople generally spend their time on prospecting activities such as generating and contacting leads. Financial professionals, such as bankers and wealth managers, often spend most of their business development time networking.

Some consultants, on the other hand, generate most of their business by showcasing their expertise through speeches and articles.

Many of us use a blend of prospecting, networking, and awareness.

Tracking Activities

CRM systems, in companies that employ them, capture all the data you need for a sales scorecard. If your company does not use a CRM, you can easily track your activities on a spreadsheet.

It doesn’t take long. But you need to get in the habit of keeping a daily tally sheet like the one below.

Assigning Values

After you decide which activities to track, assign a value to each activity. This will help you determine where to spend your time.

Here is an example of charts I used with one of my coaching clients, a salesperson named Jim (name disguised). First, we agreed on a value for each of Jim’s business development activities. They are called activity points.

Note that some activities are worth more than others. For instance, a phone call (including a voicemail message and a follow-up email) is worth one point. But a phone conversation is worth three points. And a meeting is worth 10.

Setting Goals

After you decide which activities to track, assign a value to each activity. This will help you determine where to spend your time.

Creating the Sales Scorecard

Finally, each week review your activities and points. Your CRM system should be able to generate a weekly summary report. For those of you who track your activities in a spreadsheet, design it so your daily updates feed a summary sheet.

Here is an example of Jim’s weekly sales scorecard.

Note that Jim exceeded his goal of 460 activity points for the week shown. He fell well short of his goal for calls but more than made up for the shortfall with discussions, meetings, and referrals, all more valuable activities.

The biggest take away from this sales scorecard exercise is that Jim’s performance improved over the months we worked together. Jim’s sales increased as he became very deliberate about his business development activities.

He also realized that networking activities were far more productive than cold calling. As a result, Jim scaled back his calling effort in favor of more networking.

Jim could modify his sales activities and improve his performance because he documented what he was doing each week. He couldn’t have done that without a sales scorecard.

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