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Today’s show featured an interview with Caryn Kopp, Chief Door Opener® at Kopp Consulting. Kopp Consulting is an IEPS Selling Essentials Marketplace® (SEM) service provider. Learn more about the SEM here.
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CARYN’S TIP: “If you’re not tracking the percent of first meetings that go to second meetings, you have no idea how effective your first meetings really are.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: Caryn, you were on the Sales Game Changers Podcast in the heat of the Pandemic in March of 2021. We talked then about some of your sales messaging strategies. Today, we’re going to be talking about sales effectiveness metrics. It’s perfect timing. For people who haven’t heard, the IEPS, it’s now the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. Caryn, one of the reasons why we changed our name, there’s a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the key reasons was a lot of the sales leaders at companies that are members of our entity, when we went back and surveyed them in the fall of 2024 and early 2025, they all said the same thing, “Fred, I need my people to be more effective at presenting, at storytelling, at account management, at using AI, at using social media.” Just the word effective, effective, effective kept coming up. When you and I were talking, you told me about these that you’ve developed. We’re going to go through all of them on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast.
I’m excited. We have Caryn Kopp. She’s the Chief Door Opener for Kopp Consulting, and of course, they’re best known for the Door Opener Service. Caryn, give our audience an introduction more than that. Tell us a little bit about the Door Opener Service and what else you’d like us to know about you.
Caryn Kopp: The Door Opener Service is what helps companies accelerate sales success, because it uses our senior level business developers who are known as Door Openers to open the doors and land the meetings, the big meetings, for our clients. That just makes sales easier because with your help, people are becoming more effective in having their meetings and getting through the sales process and closing the sales. With our help, they get to have more of those meetings. They get to spend more time closing because we are opening the right doors for them.
Many leaders out there, and many salespeople too, don’t realize that this can actually be an outsourced part of sales and more so than lead gen where you’re just sending out a bunch of emails, or you might have an SDR who’s trying to get the big doors open with the executive level decision makers. Here you have a senior level business developer who knows what to do, who knows what to say to pique the interest of these right prospects and get them to say yes to a meeting. That’s the Door Opener Service. We’ve been in business for 25 years, many B2B companies that are looking for those big deals and make their lives easier.
Fred Diamond: Congratulations on your success. We talk about that all the time. Everything is about the next meeting. When I talk to salespeople, I always say, sales professionals who we service at the IEPS, that everything’s about the next meeting. You want to get to the close and transactions and ongoing business, et cetera, but sometimes getting someone to meet with you again is so critical. I applaud you for your success and for a lot of the great work you’ve done for so many B2B companies out there. It’s actually quite remarkable.
Why did you create the Sales Effectiveness Metrics? Let’s start by saying what’s wrong with some of the old metrics. People would track things like number of calls, number of emails, connects, number of proposals, et cetera. What led you to rethink this? I think it’s brilliant and I’m excited that we’re going to go through each of these, because they’re all very, very pertinent, but why are we getting rid, why do you recommend we get rid of the old ones, and why did you create these new ones?
Caryn Kopp: I’m glad you’re asking that question, and this is so important for the leaders. It’s so important for the sellers to know this and to constantly monitor these metrics because it helps people know if their sales strategy is actually working. Let’s just take calls and emails, touch points, for example. When people are only monitoring the sheer number of the touchpoints, they’re not monitoring the quality of each touchpoint. If you have, let’s say, 10 crappy touchpoints to any one decision maker, you’re probably not going to get an outcome, and it doesn’t matter how many there are. If you have 60 touchpoints in an hour and they’re all crappy touchpoints, you are not going to get an outcome. When leaders are only looking at that, and when sellers are only looking at, “Well, how many touchpoints did I make in an hour?” but they’re not looking at the quality of each touchpoint, it doesn’t really matter. You might as well not have made any of those touchpoints.
What we’re looking at is what is the quality of the touchpoint, not just the calls and the emails, but the number of calls and emails to the right person, which were also of quality. That is something that a seller can monitor on his or her own, or the leaders can monitor that for the sellers. If you’re not spot checking that, then you are not doing the job to know if your sales strategy is working.
Fred Diamond: I agree with you a hundred percent. I worked for a pre-ipo dotcom company in 2000, and the guy who was the CEO would always say that people think that they’ve done their job if they send out the email, but we all know that a lot of work happens after the email, and following up, and things along those lines. I was harkened back to that moment.
Let’s go through the eight sales effectiveness metrics, and tell us why each one’s important and how our listeners, again, typically the listeners of the Sales Game Changers Podcast are B2B sales professionals. They’re in sales, they know they’re in sales, there’s no doubt about it. About a quarter of our listeners are sales leaders for those companies. Number one, percentage of closed deals, which are the right deals.
Caryn Kopp: Most of the leaders out there, and the sellers too, are just monitoring how many deals are closing, but it doesn’t matter how many deals are closing if they’re not the right deals. A lot of times people will just take the inbound leads and the referrals that come to them because those are the easy ones to close. It’s harder to go out and get the new business deals for people who need to know you versus people who land in your lap. But the ones who need to know you are likely going to be the better deals for you and also be more profitable for your company. They’re also the ones that will probably close in less time, and there’s a lot less friction in the sales process when you’re working those deals. But if you’re not monitoring the percent of closed deals, which are also the right deals, based on leadership’s definition, not the seller’s definition, but leadership’s definition of what are the right deals for them, then the company doesn’t know if their sales strategy is working. They don’t know if the deals could be closed more rapidly because they’re just taking the ones that land in their lap.
The very first thing to do is to have leadership take a good hard relook at what the definition is for the exact right kind of deal that they want. Once they do that, then go backwards and look at the deals that are in process. What percentage of those deals, if they closed, would be the right deals? What percentage of deals which closed over the last year, two years, are in alignment with what you now define as your definition for the exact right deal? Then there’s, to go backwards even further and take a look at the prospects that are in process before the proposals are in process, are they the right kinds of prospects that would even lead you to the right deal, which is actually the second sales effectiveness metric that most don’t watch.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. Actually, back to number one, the more right deals, as your company and leadership defines them, the more opportunities there are for referrals and for testimonials and for case studies, and even within the account, for additional sales, expanded sales. One of the cool things, if you’re selling B2B, there’s a lot of companies I know that can say Microsoft as a customer, or another big company, and they’re only maybe it’s 1/50th of the potential in that account. Then there’s more ideas on how can we keep going? Keep going with the percentage of prospects, which are the right prospects.
Caryn Kopp: Percent of prospects, which are the right prospects. I’ll give everybody a hint out there that that number should be a hundred percent. A hundred percent of the prospects, which sellers are working on, on any one point in time, should be a hundred percent. When it comes to the Door Opener Service, we do a lot of work helping our clients go from this wide world of prospects to more narrow world of prospects, which we actually talked about on the last show that we were on together when it was about the messaging, because it’s also about what group of prospects deserves your time and attention. But now, before you even put a prospect into rotation, let’s say the inbound lead comes in, the referral comes in, or you are going to put together a prospect list that you’re going to pursue, check it against the criteria for the definition of the exact right kind of prospect for you. If it doesn’t match the criteria with all the filters that you have for what you determine is the right kind of prospect, then you really need to question whether this prospect should be even uploaded into the CRM in the first place.
Our clients will approve every single prospect on the list before it goes into the CRM so that when our Door Openers are working that prospect list, there shouldn’t be any prospects on the list, which our clients wouldn’t be thrilled to have a meeting with because it met their definition of who is the right kind of prospect for them.
Fred Diamond: I think that’s a great idea. You and I have sat in on probably so many sales meetings where a sales rep will talk about a prospect, and as an objective bystander, you’re saying to yourself, “Why is that company on the list?” Maybe you know something about them, or they don’t make sense compared to all the other companies, yet there’s gravity or an unwillingness to question why they’re on that list. I like the fact that you said it should be a hundred percent, which makes everything, it doesn’t take you down these rat holes. That’s going to waste a lot of time. It doesn’t bring in leadership to participate when something is not going to be leading to a deal. One of the metrics is each objection, percentage of each objection. Talk about that.
Caryn Kopp: This is another metric that most people are not watching, is what percentage of the time are you facing your top objections? We monitor that. We are looking at that, the top three objections that our Door Openers face on behalf of our clients. What is that? If you are getting 75% of the time when people say no or not now, it’s because let’s say they’re not interested. Well, you may be targeting the wrong group of prospects. You may not be saying something that’s meaningful enough in your messaging before you even experience the objection, so that you are getting that objection or your answer for that objection is not strong enough either. What these sales effectiveness metrics are helping you do is diagnose what isn’t going right in your sales process, in your sales strategy, in your messaging, in your targeting, so that you could fix it.
But if you are not monitoring what those objections are and the percent of time you’re facing them, there’s no way that you could do anything about it, because you’re not collecting the information. I recommend that you incorporate this into your CRM and have salespeople tracking the amount of times that they’re experiencing this and what does it sound like? What are the exact words that people are using when they voice these objections so that you can know, is it a better answer for the objection? Is it a different target? Is it a different message that we need to be using to eliminate those objections from happening?
Fred Diamond: Monitoring those can also help with other parts of the organization. I recall working with a bunch of clients when I was an independent outsourced CMO, chief marketing officer. We deployed services similar to what your company deploys. We would track that. We would track how many people would say things like, “Well, your product doesn’t have X,” or, “I need a product that has X.” A lot of the objections that we would get were mostly, again, when you work with startup type companies or early-stage companies, frequently the objections are product related. Those are great bits of advice. You can go back to product marketing and development and say, “How come we don’t have this particular feature?” Maybe it’s not always appropriate, but the more and more type of data you get from that, the better you could bring in the rest of the organization. You also measure open tasks. Tell us what that means.
Caryn Kopp: That assumes people are using the CRM, not just have it, but actually use it too. Most CRMs have a set task feature. Some people don’t realize that there is one. Well, our Door Openers are constantly using that, because if you are pursuing, let’s say, a list of 100 people, how are you supposed to remember what number 37 tells you six weeks from now when it’s time to follow up? It’s impossible. Your set task feature can be your best friend, but what you need is on your dashboard, if you’re a leader, you can have it on your dashboard for each of your salespeople, is the number of open tasks. You want to keep an eye on that. What does that tell you? Why is that an effectiveness metric? Because if you have too many overdue tasks, that means you’re either A, not spending enough time on business development, or B, you may have a bunch of prospects that don’t deserve your time and attention, and it’s time to go back and refine the prospects that you’re working on. It’s really important to know what your open tasks are. If you have too few open tasks, you may not have enough top prospects in rotation. You may need to put more prospects in rotation so that you have more opportunities to close.
Fred Diamond: Absolutely. Which leads to the next metric, which is percentage of time spent on non-revenue-generating activities. Every sales leader that I’ve worked with, speaking of a hundred percent, that drives them nuts, when the sales professionals are working on things that aren’t going to lead to what everyone’s getting paid for. Talk about that for a little bit.
Caryn Kopp: This is a major issue with salespeople. If you actually measure how much time they’re spending on sales, and not just sales, but if the goal is net new prospects, how much time are they actually spending pursuing net new prospects? It shocks me every day when I ask leaders or sellers how much a new client is worth to them and then how much time they’re spending on just straight pursuit of those new prospects. I can’t believe how little time is actually spent pursuing those prospects. Why? Because a lot of times sellers are spending time on non-revenue-generating activities.
There’s an article on my site and it talks all about this, about the NNR exercise, is that people should keep track of time in quarter hour increments over a two-week period and what exactly they spent their time on. Then add it all up, put an N next to anything that’s a non-revenue-generating activity, and an R next to anything that is a revenue-generating activity. If you want more revenue, guess what? Reduce the time you spend on N, increase the time you spend on R, and you should have greater success. But if you’re not tracking it, then you have no idea how much time is in the N bucket at the expense of R. That’s why I am recommending keeping track of the time you’re spending on NNR activities.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great mindset to have as well as you grow your sales career. I remember I had a conversation with an elite sales professional at a big brand company, and he was a seven-figure sales professional. The one thing he hated doing was his expense reports. He did a lot of travel to achieve that seven-figure revenue goal. He would pay someone to do his expense reports, an additional fee, because it was less than what he was able to bring in on an hourly basis. It’s something you typically don’t think about. But again, if you’re a sales professional, and we say this all the time, you may be working right now at whatever the company might be, but you’re the CEO of your career.
I know people right now who are getting laid off. We’re doing today’s interview in late April of 2025. I know people who’ve been with companies for decades who are getting terminated. We’ve all seen that many times. As much as you think the company is obligated to you, you’re really obligated to your entire career.
Caryn, we hit five of them. Let’s go for the remaining three. I love this one, number of first meetings which go to second meetings. One of my mantras is getting the first meeting is one of the easiest things in sales. It’s hard to do, don’t get me wrong. You have to get through and find the right person and et cetera. That’s what you guys do better than probably any company out there. A lot of people in tech, they want to hear from you, they want to see new technology, they may not be great prospects. The great sales professionals take it to the next meeting and then of course third, fourth, fifth, sixth, et cetera, when revenue begins to kick in. Talk about that percentage, number of first meetings which go to second.
Caryn Kopp: This is a really important metric. It’s actually more important to track the percent of times the first meeting goes to the second meeting versus just tracking how many meetings you’re going to get. This is an effectiveness metric. Why? Because if your meeting goes to the second meeting, it means that three important things happened.
The first thing is it was the right prospect. What percent of prospects should be the right prospects on a hundred percent? It means it was the right prospect for you. It also means that you did a good job navigating that conversation, which a lot of people struggle how to navigate that first meeting in order to get to the second meeting. But it means that you’ve asked the right what we call high-gain questions. It means that you’ve had a good path of dialogue. It means that you were prepared for the objections. It also means that you asked for the second meeting. That’s the third part of it, is asking for the second meeting.
There’s a lot of people who don’t do that. They get the right prospect on a meeting, they have a great meeting, they uncover all sorts of opportunities, and then say to the prospect, “I’ll call you in a couple of weeks.” Instead of saying, “I’ll call you in a couple of weeks,” how about saying, “We have more to discuss on this topic. You mentioned this and this and this and it’s important we have another conversation to talk about next steps. Let’s go ahead and set a date and time. How’s Thursday at 10:00 for that?”
If they say to you, “You know what? I need Tom, Dick, and Harry in the next meeting.” What you can say is, “How often do Tom, Dick, and Harry get together? Do you have a staff meeting every week?” If they say, “Yes, our staff meeting is on Thursday at 2:00,” you say, “How about if I join that for the first 20 meetings and we can have this conversation? We don’t have to find another time.” If they say, “You know what? I can’t do it that way,” then you say, “No problem. Can you see the calendars for Tom, Dick, and Harry?” They may be able to see the calendars and not be thinking that way.
But let’s say they say, “No, I can’t see the calendars. I need to ask them individually.” Then you say, “No problem. You need a couple of days on that?” They say, “Yes, I do.” You say, “Let’s put 10 minutes on the calendar three days from now and let’s nail down the date and time so we can move forward on this.” They will typically say yes to that. If you’re not tracking the percent of time you’re getting the second meeting from the first meeting, you have no idea the effectiveness of that first meeting, which is why this is so important. Fred, this is built into our CRM. We built this into the CRM because we need to be tracking the percent of time our clients go to the second meeting, and that number should be 99.9%.
Fred Diamond: I love the way you described it too. Another common thing we talk about on the Sales Game Changers Podcast and at the Institute for Effective Professional Selling is follow up. I love the way you just described. One of the reminders here too is that as effective selling professionals, we’re of service to clients, we’re bringing them value. The people who are at the highest level of sales professionalism know that they’re bringing value. We’re helping the customer, especially the great ones, we’re helping our customer achieve goals and we can’t be forgotten in their process. We’re critical team members in helping them achieve what they need to achieve. Percentage of sellers who are the right sellers in the right roles, what is that all about, Caryn?
Caryn Kopp: There’s a lot of violations when it comes to this one, especially when it comes to door opening. Not every great sales hunter is a great door opener. It’s actually a much more narrow group of people who are not only great at getting the doors open with people they don’t know and they don’t need to be at a trade show or a conference to start a conversation. They’re very comfortable selling directly even at the C-suite. That is the only salesperson we hire. We’ve been doing this for a really long time and this is a very different person than the person who’s great at the meeting and bringing that through to a closed sale. If it’s a seller who’s hearing this, which one are you? Because it’s rare that one person is equally great in both opening and closing in a hunter role.
Usually, they’re stronger at one side or the other and they prefer one side or the other. There’s a lot of mismatches when it comes to the hiring needs. If you’re a leader, who do you have on your team? It’s okay if one person is not phenomenal at opening the door through closing the sale, but if you have a phenomenal closer, pair them with a door opener, you can outsource that or you can build your own team. But if you pair a great opener with a great closer, you can watch the magic happen. It’s a much more efficient way of accelerating sales success. But only if you’re measuring what percent of people are in the right roles when it comes to sales.
Fred Diamond: We’ve gone through seven of the eight sales effective metrics. The eighth sales effectiveness metric, time to activity. Explain that.
Caryn Kopp: Time to activity. Some people are measured by how much activity and they have to meet certain numbers, which goes back to number of calls and number of emails. But if people are only doing those activities to get to the number, every one of them may be crappy, as we talked about before. When we’re looking at time to activity, if somebody is spending 10 seconds on an email, you can bet it’s not personalized and it’s probably crappy. If they’re spending an hour and a half writing an email. They may have been doing too much research in order to get to the right personalization, the right amount of value, but it just took them too long to get there.
If it did, from a diagnostic standpoint, take them too long to get there, then it’s time to figure out why. Do they need some help in terms of knowing what nuggets to look for so that they can do meaningful personalization in less time? Or do they need some other kind of help? Another thing that will lead to, if they’re just sitting there and not making a lot of touchpoints for a particular time block, they may really not like this part of sales. Their mind is wandering and they’re not able to focus and get that work done. But if you’re not getting enough touch points for a particular time block, that’s time to dig in and find out why is that happening for you as a seller? Or if you manage a group of sellers, why is that happening for each of them and what do you do about it? Because you need quality you need numbers as long as you have the right prospects in rotation. Those critical factors are all important. Any one of them not there, then you might as well not do this at all.
Fred Diamond: Again, this was perfect timing. We just rebranded as the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. When I saw that you had these metrics that makes so much sense and could provide so much value for the sales leaders that are a part of the IEPS, the Institute for Effective Professional Selling, it was great to get John to coincide with our new launch. I want to thank you for being on today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast.
You’ve given us so many great ideas, all eight of these sales effectiveness metrics need to be implemented, but give us one thing, one specific action step. You’ve given us so many great ideas, but give us one specific action step the sales professionals listening to today’s Sales Game Changers Podcast should implement to take their sales career to the next level.
Caryn Kopp: If they are looking at these sales effectiveness metrics and they have any one that’s well below a hundred percent, really far below a hundred percent, then just pick that one and figure out what do you need to do in order to make that number as close as possible to a hundred percent and just focus on that.
Fred Diamond: That’s a great bit of advice. Get started, pick one, if you haven’t implemented these eight, and get started and see where you can go. Caryn, once again, congratulations on your success and for all the great work that you’re doing with so many B2B sales professionals and companies around the globe. It’s great to see you. Great to have you on the show again. Once again, I want to thank everybody for listening. My name is Fred Diamond. This is the Sales Game Changers Podcast.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo