Sales Performance

What is sales performance management?

Sales performance determines how efficient your sales reps are at hitting their sales quotas. Sales performance management is the process that leaders rely on to monitor sales performance, identify weak spots, and measure the impact of the sales reps. The information is then applied to coach sales reps into helping them sell better, close more deals and generate revenue.

Sales performance management helps you track sales performance, identify areas of improvement and help sales reps sell better to increase revenue.

‍Sales performance management is effective when it is centered around data and analytics. It also helps to find out the gaps in resources that your team requires to sell better. Sales leaders can discover friction that prevents sales reps from accessing tools, sales collateral, or pitches that prevent them from doing their best.

Sales performance management gives you the much-needed visibility into what matters, how to educate your reps, and transform your sales process. It also helps you structure the compensation and incentive program to reward your top-performing sales reps and motivate the rest.

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Why is sales performance management important?

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Even the most renowned business in the world requires a sales team to do the selling. Similarly, businesses need a robust selling approach to market the right product to the right prospect and convince them to buy.

A study by Mckinsey reveals that the top 30 percent of reps will outperform the bottom 30 by as much as a factor of four. When you have a sales team that collaborates and shares, you create that cohesive unit that works towards one goal - to acquire more customers. With sales performance management, you integrate data into methods that amplify the efficiency of your sales team.

The art of selling is unique but teachable and that's the end goal of sales performance management. It helps you weave data points into training your sales reps through sales coaching.

While enhancing the way you sell is the primary objective of sales performance management, it isn't the only one. When you analyze the sales performance of your team, you factor in the following as well:

• The time your sale reps invests in customer interactions
• The number of deals they closed within a given period
• The best wins of your sales reps
• How well do your sales reps adapt and apply the product's sales pitch?
• What are they getting right during a sales call and what are the key areas of improvement
• The prospects that slipped away due to poor engagement
• How do they incorporate previous feedback into their sales approach
• Identify the rep’s strength and connect the sales reps to calls that requiring their specialty
• Help leaders assess the capacity of the sales team and individual reps to plan a goal, commit to quotas and create an incentive program

Sales performance management today has a much more vital role to play. It helps leaders acquire granular-level visibility into their team's functioning. It also helps them make informed decisions to accelerate sales and increase revenue with the help of real-time data instead of guesswork.

Components of sales performance management

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To see how sales performance management helps you reinvent your sales strategy, you need to understand the impact it creates. Sales performance management can be ingrained into four critical sales enablement processes:

1. Recruitment and onboarding
2. Sales training
3. Territory assignment
4. Sales commission and compensation
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◼️ Recruitment and onboarding

When you set out to build your team or add more people, the insights you have about your existing team help you fill the skills gap. You understand the skills that the new member should possess to support your team better. This helps you narrow down your search better and bring in a resource who proves to be a valuable asset who can complement your team.
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◼️ Sales training

The most important impact of sales performance management is the effect it has on transforming sales training. The quality of training you provide is tangible in how effective the sales rep is in creating an exceptional experience on a sales call. When you evaluate sales performance, you understand the weakness of your sales team. This helps you find the core focus of your sales training to guide your reps better and improve their conversions.
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◼️ Territory assignment

When you know the strengths of your sales reps, you can have them transition into specific areas of selling seamlessly. You may have someone who is an expert in product demos while some reps are good at handling frustrated prospects. When you create territories, you trust your team to handle specific legs of the sales cycle. This way, you don't have one sales rep handling everything and burning out easily. You have a team that owns different operations of the sales process, collaborate better and collectively win more customers.
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◼️ Sales commission and compensation

Sales performance management removes friction in evaluating the overall performance of your sales reps. This is key when it comes to setting compensation and rewards for your team members. When you have performance-based insights, you avoid underpaying your team members and creating resentment. Sales performance management helps you reward your team appropriately by celebrating their wins. You drive your team to deliver consistently and create a happy team focused on taking your business to the right people.

Who uses Sales performance management software?

A sales performance management software benefits leaders, managers, mentors, and trainers. With transparent reporting and analysis, various stakeholders can derive benefits that improve the team's performance overall.
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◼️ Sales leaders
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Sales leaders can identify the most common query that prospects ask during the sales calls. This helps them in making informed decisions in awareness-raising campaigns, creating sales decks, and refining the sales pitch for the sales team. With more insights, sales leaders can confidently make business decisions like committing pricing, discounts, improve pipeline management, set sales forecasts, and more. They can also utilize the inputs from the performance assessment to change the framework, adopt strategies that work, and improve sales productivity.
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◼️ Sales managers
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Sales managers are responsible for overseeing if the sales reps discharge their duties. This also means finding out where the reps are struggling, communicating needs to improve their selling, and identifying winning practices. By identifying gaps and addressing them proactively, managers guide reps in qualifying the leads better, creating a healthy pipeline, and shortening the sales cycle. They play an important role in setting up their sales reps for success on every call.
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◼️ Mentors/trainers
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Each sales rep requires a peer to coach them, help them get the nuances of selling right. With sales performance management software, mentors get access to how reps are handling calls, identify things that could be better. This can be weaved into their ongoing training and coaching plan to create high-performing sales teams. Regular call audits and auto transcription saves more time, helps them skim through the important section of calls, and create solid sales coaching and training materials.
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◼️ Sales reps
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Sales reps are the biggest benefactors of the sales performance management software. The performance analysis is extremely resourceful and helps reps build their skills. It helps them refine their selling by giving them an opportunity to learn from their mistakes and improve. Some sales performance management software also compartmentalizes sales calls based on patterns. This helps reps identify if their talk ratio was adequate, if they spent time addressing queries, or asking the right question.
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Use sales performance management software to raise the effectiveness of your sales reps

When you have a large team of sales reps, reviewing every call is important. With limited time and other pressing tasks requiring your attention, it becomes overwhelming to review every sales call. But that doesn’t mean it is impossible.

Convin brings AI-powered sales performance management to empower you to assess your team’s calls, breaking them down into segments and simplifying them for your team to review.

1. Discover real-time sales activity

Convin gives your team a powerful dashboard that lets you find how active your sales reps have been. This gives you an overview of the calls they answer, the time they’ve spent with your prospects and more. Identify how productive your team has been in one centralized platform.

2. Automate call transcription in minutes

Hour long call with a prospect? No problem, transcribe the calls in minutes and skim through the pleasantries exchanged easily. Convin helps you easily transcribe calls to minimize the effort involved and simplify sales call reviews.

3. Break down your sales calls
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Convin’s state-of-the-art AI-powered technology lets you surface vital insights by breaking down your sales calls automatically. Discover customer sentiments, get to core areas of your call and offer feedback that helps your sales reps improve.

4. Compare your reps’ performance
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Discover the edge your top performing reps have by comparing their performance with that of your low performing reps. Unlock the traits your team requires to become high-performing sales reps and close more deals easily.

5. Benchmark your wins

When you’ve got back-to-back wins, let your team study them closely and get inspired. Help your sales reps improve by collating a sales call playbook that contains your best wins for them to learn from. Create a playlist of your memorable wins and deliver exceptional sales training that makes things stick.

6. Offer valuable feedback

With effective call reviews and instant feedback, you can coach your sales team as soon as the call is over. This will help them to absorb the takeaways, fix their course of action and reach the prospect before they slip away.

Your sales team is responsible for connecting with prospects, building their trust and convincing them to try your product/service. Without real-time inputs of your sales rep’s performance, offering feedback becomes complicated and your training will be inadequate.

With a sales performance software, you can easily surface actionable insights from sales calls. This helps you offer data-driven feedback rather than feedback based on assumptions and guesswork.

With Convin as your sales performance management software, you get end-to-end visibility into your sales call, reduce the time needed to evaluate calls and obtain solid insights to offer benefits and compensation for your sales reps.