Establishing and tracking metrics for sales opportunities is often a challenge – and defining success metrics for demos can also be tough. Here is one metric that can provide top-level insight into your demo practices:
Number of Demos/Closed Sales $
Very simply, measure how many demos are delivered per closed opportunity dollar (or Euro, Yen, etc.). I recommend normalizing to something like Demos/$10K closed or Demos/$100K closed to make the resulting numbers easy to work with.
Why should you care?
Tracking some additional level of granularity will typically reveal interesting and “actionable” information. For example:
– Tracking Demos/$100K on a per-salesperson basis provides direct insight into each salespersons’ ability to effectively utilize presales resources.
– Tracking Demos/$100K on a per-presales-person basis sheds light onto presales individual effectiveness.
The overhead to set up and track these two metrics on an ongoing basis should quite low. Many organizations already track the number of demos delivered by each presales person; crossing this information with revenues and sales people is the additional work.
The rewards of establishing, tracking and comparing these metrics over time can be remarkable!
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