Buyer Energy – The Real Measure of Sales Effectiveness 

There’s lots of buzz about tracking and measuring sales rep activity. Exactly what sales reps do on a daily basis has been a mystery for decades—especially B2B reps not tethered to a call center. For the most part, the technology is here and available to track rep activity. But, we’re missing the boat here. It’s not what sales reps do, it’s what the buyers do that matters. Let me explain. 

I’ve seen sales reps that are crazy-active—sending emails, making calls, following-up, getting creative—you name it. Good people—articulate, smart, seemingly capable. But despite the effort, they can’t seem to book meetings on a consistent basis. Much less move deals forward at a healthy rate. There’s just something missing. They don’t have the sales DNA, the “spark” of sales success. 

So, to measure rep effectiveness, instead of focusing on what reps do, focus on the buyer activity they generate. Let’s look at a black hole as a physics example. 

We can’t see the light from a black hole because its gravitational pull is so powerful no light escapes it. But, we know a black hole exits because the stars and other matter swirl around it. There’s no doubt about this in the astrophysics community. In fact, here’s the first image of a black hole ever captured in 2019. 

You can see the energy swirling around the blacked-out center, clearly showing its existence. 

Likewise, good reps have buyer activity swirling around them. We can’t exactly see or know why buyers respond to certain reps, but we know that it happens. If the personality of the rep is the black hole, we don’t know why the buyers swirl around them—their messaging, their confidence, their passion, their product knowledge—whatever. We just know that it happens or doesn’t, because we can see the surrounding evidence. 

Measuring the personality and magnetism of a great rep is hard. Great reps come in so many different personality types and characteristics. It’s very hard for AI or human intelligence to predict the success on personality, at least at this point. What we can do now is predict success based on how buyers respond to reps—the swirling behavior of buyers around a rep. The science around this is clear. 

The Buyer Energy Score 

The Energy Score measures how much energy sellers generate from buyers. It’s a composite score made up of sub-scores. It is sophisticated well beyond raw activity. It considers how many buyers are engaging and how fast they respond. But maybe more importantly, it considers which buyers are engaging—higher levels versus mangers or operational level people.  

Sales Activity is a Poor Success Indicator 

Sales activity can be very misleading. Reps can plod along their merry way, emailing, calling, reaching out on LinkedIn, and engaging buyers. Ultimately, their results will tell you whether they are successful. But results take a while to manifest—especially in complex sales with long cycles. 

All sales managers and leaders have experienced reps with high activity levels, but just can’t produce sales in the end. It’s tempting to give these reps more time because the effort is there. They send the emails, make the calls, and even enter lots of data in CRM. But sales activity levels just don’t equate to sales success. 

Buyer Energy is Leading Indicator 

The Energy Score cuts to the chase. It tells reps and mangers whether buyer teams are engaging and to what degree. Energy is a predictive, leading indicator, meaning you can tell whether a rep is going to be effective and successful sooner rather than later by looking at the energy they generate across their opportunities—well before they actually close any deals. 

Sales Results are a Lagging Indicator 

In contrast, sales win results are a lagging indicator—a rear view mirror metric that can’t predict success until after it happens. Measuring rep performance on results (a common practice) is costly. There is always the tendency to “Give ‘em another quarter—maybe they’ll start producing.” But giving low performing reps another quarter, or worse, until the end of the year is hugely expensive to sales teams. 

SEE ALSO: The Cost of a Bad Sales Rep 

Summary 

Here’s the bottom line. Getting the right sales reps on the team is the biggest, most important factor in sales team success. This means identifying low performers quickly so you can coach them or replace them with better performers. If you want to get your sales execution at optimal levels, start analyzing leading indicators like Buyer Energy rather than inconclusive indicators likes sales activity, and lagging indicators like sales results. 

Hope you have your best year ever. 

Pete McChrystal 

Accent Technologies is the first and only SaaS company to bring together Sales AI and Content Management in a true revenue enablement platform. We provide both sales and marketing with better visibility into the performance of their teams. This drives revenue through intelligent recommendations for complex sales scenarios, and provides the data for rich analytics that calculate buyer energy and power better coaching and forecasting for sales management. Learn more about our solutions or request a LIVE DEMO to see it in action.