In the consulting and technology service world one of the most important measures that is used is utilization, productivity or billable hours. Production and manufacturing employees are sometimes measured in similar ways.

What this measurement tells you is how much of a resource is being used for the purpose you intended versus what the available resource there is. If I bill 30 out of 40 hours in a week I am at 75% Utilization for example.

I want to apply that same measurement to my sales professionals. In all the sales teams I have worked with over the last 20 years I have never seen it done, nor are the Sales Force Automation tools designed to track such a metric.

Sales professionals are some of the most costly resources a business can have and they are key to making business happen, shouldn’t it stand to reason that they should be measured effectively on how much of their time is being used for what you hired them to do.

In my current world what I need sales professionals to do is be face to face with clients, creating opportunities, looking for ways to help clients, moving the sales dialogue along, facilitating solution development and so on. So I am going to measure sales to client face time, weekly, monthly and quarterly.

I can pull the meeting detail from our SFA system and then total the hours against the worked hours for the period and graph the number. This will be one indicator (there are others) of how productive my sales team is being. Of course just having meetings doesn’t mean you conduct them effectively but the first major goal is to have the right volume of meetings.

If you have similar measures you use for tracking your sales team productivity leave me a comment, I would love to learn what works for you.