Every sales manager knows the basics about his or her sales team and selling process – which reps are the A, B, and C performers; the length of the sales cycle; the dollar amount of the average deal, and so on. However, successful management requires much more in-depth awareness of what’s going on in a sales organization. For instance, do you know the common stalling points in your sales process? Or which competitors you lose the most business to and why?

Entellium, a provider of sales force automation tools, recently released a white paper called “25 Questions Top-Performing Sales Teams Can Answer.” Though many of the questions are clearly marketing driven, others should give sales managers pause for thought and are worth a closer look. Here are five questions to which you should know the answers for your organization:

1. Which lead sources result in the highest percentage of closed deals? Do you know where your best leads come from and what those leads look like? When you do, you can better direct your marketing efforts and dollars while boosting your conversion rate.
2. Are your reps selling the most profitable products? Often, reps will sell the products that are easiest to sell rather than the ones that provide the highest margin for the company. Face it: they’re going to get to quota the easiest way they can and if it means selling lower margin products, they’re going to do it. Managers must know which products are most profitable and direct behavior toward those products. While that’s typically accomplished by implementing the right compensation plan, the question remains: do you know, at any given moment, which reps are selling the profitable products and which are not?
3. What percentage of the time is your sales process being followed? This is an important question. Assuming, of course, that you have a process in the first place, do you know how often reps are adhering to it? Many sales executives have lamented that there are sometimes as many processes as there are reps. If your sales results are in need of a course correction, dig into this question. It may turn out that fixing those results is as simple as getting everyone to adhere to your established process.
4. Where do your reps tend to stall in the sales process? In other words, do you know exactly how deals move through the pipeline for all your reps and where in that pipeline reps tend to get hung up? If so, you “can understand where individual reps are getting stuck and use this insight to help them get deals moving again,” say the folks at Entellium. “Sometimes a strong theme emerges that can be addressed across the team, like a competitive threat that may not be easily spotted otherwise.”
5. Which competitors do you lose the most business to, and why? All managers knows who their biggest competitors are, but do you know precisely how much business you lose to each one? And more importantly, do you know why? When you understand the answers to these questions you can better position your company and your strengths. You can craft presentations that hit these issues head-on. In short, by fully understanding your losses, you put yourself in a better position to secure more wins.