For most consulting firms sales analysis comprises deals won / sales revenue / target.
This absolute, binary, success/failure measurement is lacking. It’s what bean-counters like but it’s totally useless for deciding how to improve performance.
Instead of this, I encourage you to analyse at a more granular level. Starting with the three revenue increasing strategies, build a scorecard.
- Find and win more clients (while keeping your current ones).
- Increase your average project fee.
- Have clients buy from you more often.
Looking at sales like this, over time, you’ll see trends that show up the dangers and opportunities for your business. Here’s some examples of what I mean by that.
Dangers:
a) One in / One out. We win new clients but overall the number of clients we have remains static.
b) Average project fee is stagnant. Perhaps we’re not perceived as a good choice for larger projects.
c) Single projects and slow project turnover. We’re not winning multiple bundles of work from certain clients.
Opportunities:
d) Client number increase when we sell new services to old clients and old services to new clients.
e) Our project fees are significantly larger for certain types of client.
f) We win more work, faster, by proactively digging out expensive issues whilst we’re in delivery mode.
Trends like these are the first indicators that different approaches to selling are required. Capture more work based on the opportunities, and implement plans to eliminate the dangers.
If you’re not doing this type of rough-cut analysis quarterly then you’re almost certainly missing out. Of course there’s a DIY option for this. But getting an external perspective from someone who deeply understands business development is even more useful, and productive.
That’s what I do with my clients each quarter. Based on my experience and coaching they make unique distinctions that are enabling them to grow their business.
DIY, or external expertise, that’s a choice. But don’t avoid doing sales analysis altogether.
Related post
Why revenue and profit are rubbish metrics.