Tips for Better Sales Performance Management

What is Sales Performance Management

Sales performance management (SPM) is the practice of monitoring and guiding personnel to improve their ability to sell products or services.  Sales Performance Management marries the traditional discipline of sales management with a more rigorous, focused, and metrics-driven approach to optimize resources and improve sales performance. Ultimately, this leads to generating repeatable and predictable revenue.

It would be fair to say that, today, you might have staff underperforming and who may never reach their quota goals. More importantly, you may have people who could easily rise above their current performance. They don’t because they are not being task-focused, measured, and incentivized to reach their quota goals.

Why have SPM in your Organization

Why do companies consider implementing Sales Performance Management? It could be because the growth in revenue was below the company’s expectations. Other issues include high sales team churn, lengthening sales cycles, inaccurate sales forecasts, and a lack of alignment with marketing, where the invested capital in lead generation is not paying off in increased sales.

Many companies focus on lag indicators such as these and don’t realize they have a problem it’s too late. Often it’s 6 – 12 months too late! They will have experienced a loss of potential revenue or margins and may show increased operating costs!  Gamification, along with an incentive component plays a large role in the “motivation” aspect of SPM.

Positive Impact of SPM on Organizations

In companies that do not have specific SPM in place, it is usual for only 50% of reps to make their quota goals. However, when SPM is in place companies can expect to grow quota goal attainment to over 81% of sales reps.  Companies using SPM would typically have a 3x higher annual growth in revenue than non-SPM companies.40% of executives rely more on instinct to drive territory and Incentive decisions

SPM is focused on improving the performance of your sales organization and your sales team’s effectiveness as well as efficiency. It increases productivity, streamlines sales processes, and drives desired sales activity behaviors to achieve the best results.

This is How We Help with a Gamified Approach to SPM

Gamified SPM takes a substantial step beyond traditional sales management. It is grounded in technologies that sync data from your data apps, which could be as simple as Google Sheets or as sophisticated as world-leading CRM’s like Salesforce. They sync information about specific sales activities in these data apps. Once set up nothing more is required, the game runs effortlessly.  The data is presented to the rep and the manager in a real game. Progress in the game is determined by the sales rep updating these activities in the primary data source.    

Healthy workplace competition motivates team members. Competitions should vary in order to focus on the sales activities required today in order to achieve the company outcomes tomorrow.

Games could be a race to the activity goal or collaboration games where your Stars help their low performing colleagues to be successful. It could be one that randomly eliminates poor performers from the comp or you instill a sense of urgency by setting a stretch goal within a deadline.

The best gamified SPM can reinforce good data practices and the adoption of update philosophies within the company.    

Conclusion

Your organization lives and dies on the success of your sales force. Gamified SPM makes it incredibly simple for sales managers to set up and runs contests that measure activities and the execution of them against a quota goal. Sales Performance Management is what best-in-class sales organizations have in place to be successful and continue to build a competitive advantage.

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