The prevalent way of measuring sales performance is a combination of KPIs. These include the obvious sales results, and a few others, like number of calls and meetings, new opportunities, etc.
However, longer sales cycles and more complex ways of selling like Solution Selling and Value Based Selling, or segmentation approaches like Strategic / Key Account Management demand a more sophisticated approach to measuring effectiveness. The biggest challenge when measuring the performance of our sales teams is how to measure quality rather than just quantity of sales results.
Leaders need to move from a deficiency orientation (i.e. performance management when things go wrong) to a competency orientation (i.e. coaching people to achieve their best performance and be their best selves). This requires a mindset shift with managers involved in such a transformation.
In sales, this means answering questions such as:
- Does the sales team regularly and accurately identify the needs and priorities of its clients?
- How does the sales team present solutions to its clients?
- How explicit and relevant are the solution recommendations put forward by the sales team?
- How thoroughly does the sales team follow up with prospects and clients to advance and close sales, build relationships, stay in touch?
- How effective is the sales team at executing the overall sales process to deliver viable sales results?
One of the key goals of identifying and measuring salespeople’s performance levels is to ensure you can influence qualitative performance before the resulting measures are taken, (when the subsequent opportunity to alter performance and change the course of events is gone). To stretch this thought even further: With KPIs and the myriad of other measurements taken and considered, the challenge remains to some extent on how to forecast performance results.
Predicting performance
KPIs and performance reviews can’t predict performance. You can’t improve (or influence in any way for that matter) performance after an action has taken place or should have been performed, it’s too late because results are a history lesson.
Moving from a review of performance after the event to managing activity and behaviours during or prior to the event, you will be able to take a lot of the controlling and reporting pressures out of your sales team, and better support them to enhance their sales performance.
Sales management
To ensure that the agreed performance targets and objectives are in fact the focus of everyone’s day-to-day efforts, management must be able to continuously observe these things happening whilst they happen!
Sales managers need to become sales coaches for their teams. This, in itself, is great for ensuring continuous and practical learning on the road to mastery. The context of effective KPIs, however, adds another purpose to coaching salespeople; it makes it possible on a regular basis to be present during ‘performance’ to observe, assess and help improve it on the go. Coaching salespeople in this fashion adds more meaning to the coaching and reduces the need to evaluate and interpret potentially inappropriate or unhelpful performance figures.
This gentler approach (i.e. coaching) to performance management is less about creating a system of cascading, reviewing, and aligning targets and measures, and more (if done right) about developing leadership, inspiring, and having conversations that engage people on both an emotional and practical level. Leadership, in this sense, creates a vision—it inspires and motivates, but also creates a sense of commitment and accountability. The management role needs to be filled with alignment and discipline as much as with empathy and the desire to help and support people to be their best.
Time Commitment
Being a leader and a coach requires time. Whilst coaching is time-saving in the long run, the initial time investment to get people up to speed can be seen as a deterrent to many businesses and sales leaders. There is one more opportunity for managers to try and influence performance: not while it happens, but before. It is not necessary to sit next to your salespeople to ensure that they are making enough prospecting calls. If planned and prepared properly, there should be time allocated for such activities in the same way that there is time for client meetings. A quick, daily look into the calendars of the sales team helps identify upcoming activities (or lack thereof). A quick morning huddle or an individual chat (Management by Walking Around) helps ensure all potential hurdles are out of the way, support is given where needed and the direction of activities is reconfirmed and transparent.
Remember, everybody lives by selling something.
Stories from the field
“I used the ‘phone conversation structure’ and I have a meeting with a client I thought was not going to re-engage with us. The client was very positive and stated she wants to work with us moving forward.
“Wow. This good feeling may become addictive.”
(a day after the first session of a 2-day workshop)
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