I have recently been charged with creating an
Sales Performance Measurement in a manufacturing industry
Answers
You are starting off with a rather expansive target. I will provide some thoughts to get things rolling but you need to narrow down your scope. Start with the sales pipeline, what drives orders? Perhaps track # calls made, quotes issued. Once you have an order how about on time shipments vs. late? Backlog? Shipments to plan? track quality--# and $ value of returns, customer complaints, scrap etc. Is downtime an issue in your process? If this causes sales issues track OEE or other metrics. we track value added. If machines are running well we know what we expect per shift and daily in sales value to be produced. If labor is an issue track headcount or labor dollars. After the sale monitor collections/dso just like you would with your retail background. But don't just gather numbers. Figure out what drives success by talking to your mfg., sales and finance people. They should be able to tell you what they believe is key to happy customers and ultimately profits.
Building on Vernon's wise counsel, may I suggest:
1. start with a plant walk through. Follow an order from creation (in sales) to delivery and understand the business processes that have to be executed to fulfill the order. Try to identify what your colleagues see as pains today, as well as what they think is key to delivering an order on time, in full, no errors.
2. are you a "make to stock" or "make to order" plant? This may drive how/what you measure regarding order lead time, on time delivery%, number of rush orders + reasons
3. combine financial and operational data-e.g. number of sales orders, average order size (units and $), number of times an order is changed before delivery
4. get someone to test and challenge your workings, assumptions and analyses before your present them
I heartily agree with Vernon that SPM is an expansive target. If you can get your hands on a copy of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Sales Performance
As Jim suggested, read the Gartners Magic Quadrant for SPM - the latest release in January 2015. We (Anaplan) are seeing more and more organizations adopting SPM in both sales and