Setting new sales goals for the year can be difficult. If you want to drive higher performance with sales performance management, these five strategies are the perfect way to start the year off on the right foot.
1. Make Every Day A Game Day
This is all about accountability, transparency, and engagement. Look for the program improvement opportunities that can make your sales force more accountable. Add features that will make the performance more transparent throughout the organization and implement regular communication that engages your sales force.
For example:
- What are the quick wins to ensure that targets and quotas, in fact, add up to the national target?
- What tactics can be implemented to ensure all salespeople have visibility of the metrics that are crucial to the business' success?
- What techniques can you employ to ensure that salespeople are engaging with your sales performance and sales incentive program every working day of the year?
2. Get Real About Target & Quota Setting
Make it your mission to eliminate the BS in quota setting. BS stands for the “big stretch”. Let’s face it, making the numbers isn’t getting easier. Work out what the targets need to be to make the company numbers. Full stop. Forget the psychological game playing and finger crossing. More transparency. Not less. Anyone that is fooled by those big stretch target tricks shouldn’t be on your sales team anyway.
3. Eliminate Hidden Costs
Manual processes, discretionary business rules, overly complex schemes, and multiple data sources of truth are all adding to the cost of your sales incentive program and reducing sales productivity. It’s like sand in the gearbox. Your program is going to break at some point and your competition is getting ahead.
If you are still using spreadsheets you are using technology that is 30 years out of date. Like it or not. Your sales force wants information when they want it and where they want it. Make it live and make it mobile. Most of your salespeople have grown up with the internet. Their expectations are higher.
4. Make Sure You Can Measure
If you really, truly, madly desire high performance from your sales team, make sure you know what high performance looks like and that you can measure it. Don’t fall into the trap (again?) of including sales performance metrics in your program that can’t be measured in a transparent, accountable and engaging way.
For example, you need to have your Net Promoter Score program in place now if customer engagement is going to be a key focus this year. It’s too late to be adding new metrics if they can't already be measured now.
5. Don’t Leave Your Sales Playbook At Home
There’s an emerging trend in the B2B sales space: the need for a kick-ass sales playbook. Does your sales team have one?
The sales process (or more appropriately, the buying process) is getting more complex with better-informed buyers wanting to do their due diligence as well as their coffee. Do you have a playbook that covers the key steps, the key moves, the crucial answers to all the questions that will be asked during the sales process? If not... you need to be developing a sales playbook.