Il contesto
A B2B distributor with a field sales team of five. Each worked their own way, and the only number that really counted was month-end revenue. Whoever billed the most was the good one, full stop.
La sfida
Measuring revenue alone hid everything else. Salespeople cultivated the usual large accounts and ignored the rest of the portfolio; new clients always came from the same person; no one looked at the margin of the sales. Management had no way of seeing where the network worked and where it didn't, nor what to act on, because there was a single number and it arrived too late.
Il nostro intervento
- We defined a set of five shared KPIs: revenue, margin, new clients, portfolio coverage and visit-to-order conversion rate.
- Alongside outcome indicators we added activity indicators (visits, clients contacted), which a salesperson can act on before the month closes.
- Each salesperson got a target per KPI, built on their real portfolio rather than the same for everyone, so the targets were credible.
- The monthly meeting became a shared reading of the dashboard: not a trial of who sells least, but a discussion of where to push next month.
- A single dashboard made the same numbers visible to everyone, salespeople and management, updated and readable at a glance.
I numeri del caso
With a coverage KPI next to revenue, salespeople stopped working only the usual large accounts.
Before, new clients depended on a couple of people. With shared targets, the whole network started acquiring.
For years I rewarded whoever billed the most. Only by looking at the KPIs did I realise that was also the one acquiring the fewest new clients.
The sales director
Il risultato
In two quarters portfolio coverage went from 48% to 74% and new clients won by the network nearly tripled, from 8 to 22 per quarter. But the real change was different: salespeople stopped experiencing the KPIs as surveillance and started using them to see where they were leaving opportunities on the table.
I casi sono anonimizzati per tutelare la riservatezza dei clienti.