A fleeting force at the center of your business
Sales is one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, professions out there. It attracts highly driven individuals who welcome every challenge thrown at them. Salespeople thrive in the pressure of that this profession often comes with. It's these people who form one of the most important units in your business: your sales team.
Despite being one of the most rewarding professions, sales jobs also have one of the highest turnovers, with an average rate of 35%. That's a significantly higher percentage than the average of all the other industries, at 13%.
The key to retaining your sales team
Every job has a learning curve. Even for someone who has spent years mastering a profession, there's always something new to learn, or a way to improve an existing skill set. The same logic applies to your sales team. If you help newer sales reps learn the skills they need to excel at their job and achieve their goals, they'll have higher levels of job satisfaction. In turn, this also helps your business retain skilled sales reps for longer tenures.
How to help your sales team achieve more
The key to a successful sales team is having a solid sales performance management process in place. Defined goals for individual sales reps that are built around the long term objectives of your business will set your sales reps up for success. It's the best way to ensure that sales reps learn, excel, and help your business, as well as feel valued for their contributions.
Here are some ways in which a good sales performance management strategy can help you:
Optimize your
pre-sales process
The quality of leads that your pre-sales team passes on to your sales can greatly affect the outcome of a deal. Make sure you have a well defined lead generation and qualification strategy in place. A good strategy will both educate prospects and help your presales team identify pain points to pass onto your sales team to address.
Understand your
sales funnel
Analyze your sales cycles and anticipate when prospects are ready to move to the next stage of the funnel. Use your sales data to predict this and take the necessary steps to help move the prospect along if they stagnate at a particular stage for too long.
Use the right tools
A robust sales performance management tool can help sales leaders in forecasting, planning quotas, calculating incentives, and providing detailed analytics to help your sales team perform better.
Be value-centric
Customers tend to connect with a business that provides a solution to their problem, rather than a sales pitch. Your processes should support your sales reps in creating and offering value to their customers by understanding their issues and proposing solutions.
The impact of implementing a
sales performance management
A sales performance management tool is a feedback mechanism to keep your sales team
functioning at their best, for both the short and long term goals of your business.
Your sales reps will be able to see:
- A defined quota that they are expected to achieve
- A complete view of their pipeline
- How closed deals impact their overall compensation
It can help sales managers to:
- Generate sales forecasts
- Set realistic goals for their sales team
- Create territories to manage prospects effectively
What to look for in a sales
performance management tool
There are specialized tools designed specifically for sales performance management. But the best choice would be to look for a CRM with built-in SPM capabilities, as this is where your sales team will be spending most of their time. This ensures that all the information your sales reps and managers need is available in one location, with the necessary context.
Let's explore the features you should be looking for:
Plan and manage your quotas
The importance of setting realistic sales goals becomes all the more important when you realize that only 23% of salespeople made their quota in 2019. Your sales manager needs to be able to track how a region, product, or team is performing by creating forecasts based on territories or hierarchies.
Based on those forecasts, different quotas can be set for different teams and individuals. That way, you know that the vision of the senior executives aligns with the reality of the sales team.
Learn more about forecasting and quota management
Build scalable and repeatable sales
Highly productive sales processes should be repeated. With features like Blueprint, you can gently guide users through what actions should be taken at what time, and ask them the right questions at the right time. Now, you can make your process repeatable for new hires, as well as long-time salespeople. This allows you to scale your process as your sales team grows and ensure they give the same level of attention to your prospects and customers.
Learn more about process management
Design the right territory structure
Demarcating territories and assigning the right sales reps to those territories is essential to a successful sales team.The territories can be customers segmented by factors like geographies, products, industry, expected revenue, or something else. Segmenting your customers helps your sales force to maximize sales opportunities, establish strong relationships, and drive revenue.
Learn more about territory management
Build end-to-end customer journeys
The experience a prospect has directly impacts how easy or hard it is for your sales rep to convert them into paying customers. CommandCenter helps you provide and keep track of thousands of such personal journeys, without compromising your brand experience. A great brand experience leads to a happy prospect, which makes it easier for a sales rep to close the deal.
Lear more about CommandCenterAugment sales efforts with
recommendations
The key to maximizing sales opportunities is finding the right product or service (or a combination of both) to recommend to customers. It's hard to do this manually, but with AI, your sales reps can make stronger and more accurate recommendations to the customers who need them. By analyzing information about past customers, Zoho CRM can suggest the right products and bundles to recommend to customers and capitalize on every cross-sell and up-sell opportunity.
Learn more about recommendations
A friendly competition to motivate
your sales team
Sales reps are competitive by nature–they yearn to convert the most prospects and they revel in closing the biggest deals. So why not turn this drive into some fun competition? Sales reps get badges and trophies for converting the most leads, following up quickly, or closing the most deals. Gamification lets your business turn routine activities into a fun competition for your sales team and helps build a livelier workplace.
Learn more about Gamescope
Predict prospects and deals your
sales team needs to focus on
The performance of your sales team and your revenue is tied to the prospects and deals your reps work on. Trying to chase everything simultaneously will hurt both their commission and your bottom line. With AI and machine learning, the pattern behind every win and loss can be identified. The CRM uses those patterns to assign a probability score to each prospect or deal. This helps sales reps focus on the prospects with a higher probability of converting and spend less time chasing deals that may never close.
Learn more about predictions
Convert numbers into insight
Sales managers need accurate numbers to make good business decisions. Information like the status of the pipeline, the price and discounts of products, where reps stand with respect to their quotas, and various other KPIs must be available. By analyzing this data, sales leaders can take corrective measures to improve other metrics, like sales cycles, deals closed, average deal size, and more.
Learn more about analytics