Sales performance management strategies are all about efficiency – doing more with less. Establishing efficient strategies can be difficult. One of the main reasons for this problem is inherent in the very development of efficiency – the more time you spend building something, the faster and better it has to be to qualify as a good return on investment. Organizations have to strike a balance between the planning stage for sales improvement and actually putting an initiative in practice.
One of the reasons sales performance management is so effective is that it can help organizations improve sales by applying collected data to areas of inefficiency. Wherever an organization is in its development process, it stands to benefit by focusing more on using data, metrics and incentives to generate more productivity.
- Get status updates instantly: Instead of holding a weekly or biweekly meeting in which employees simply recite how they perceive their performance or managers compare results, thereby grinding operations to a halt, use sales performance management software. Employee sales and operational activity is updated in real time, making it easy for managers to centralize data and get a good picture of how sales are going right at their fingertips. Plus, if employees have access to these metrics, they have more insight into their own activity in the context of the whole team. Don’t use crucial meeting times summarizing information you could peruse beforehand. Which brings us to our next point:
- Collaborate with a purpose: Efficiency often stems from collaboration. Employees should have time to interact with each other and management, but using this time as a strategy period, rather than a summary, enables personnel to look forward, not backward. Driven collaboration also makes employees more connected to their work and gives them a time to let their creative flag fly.
- Plan more effectively: Lackluster time, personnel and resource projections can cripple an organization, especially if it’s a recurring problem, according to MarketingProfs contributor Bryan Nielson. Sales performance management software allows real-time reporting of project progress, which can then be applied to resourcing initiatives. This eliminates over- or under-resourcing a project and the bottlenecks that often result. This improves output and creates more opportunities for a higher ROI.
- Align the vision: By investing in a centralized software platform to assess sales performance, an organization is able to align the team’s vision and approach. This integrated approach can then be applied to other areas of the organization, according to Compliance Week. Today’s best-run businesses are able to understand how an area like sales connects to a seemingly unrelated area, like risk management. Eliminating silos and promoting a unified approach drives efficiency across the organization.
