Practical Ways to Revitalize Your Sales Team: Calibrate Your Measures

A sales team applies strategic production metrics to define success. Choosing the most accurate metrics is very important because the measured processes significantly impact sales team practices.

To invigorate your sales force, use a metrical diagnostic to determine which behaviors are being encouraged.

1. How do your performance metrics influence the sales team?
2. Do the most effective measures line up with your mission? Explain why or why not.
3. Without relying on the performance-to-quota metric, are you able to evaluate which team member contributes most to sales success? Why or why not?
4. Regarding current measures, what are their return-on-investment results?
5. Do these measures adequately identify prospective leaders for planning future succession? Why or why not?

Example: Aligned Measurement

Practical ways to revitalize your sales team include the importance of using strong performance metrics to establish predictability and impact team members’ behavior. Great performance metrics establish a culture of accessibility for productivity, capability, skill, and information exchanges.

Challenge:  One of our clients is a medical corporation that helps customers reshape disease states.  They were forced to confront a volatile performance metric due to the fact that sales cycles were extensive and transactions were relatively few but quite large.

Measuring high-quality sales team members on transaction volume had become troublesome. A certain amount of business resulted from national campaigns; more came from industry consolidation and differentiated offerings selected by specific customers that routinely moved to new locations.

Administrators were unable to determine who stimulated business as opposed to simply taking orders.

Recommendation:  We recommended that they eliminate quota performance accountability from a regional sales team member and make the division vice president responsible for meeting sales goals.

Individual sales personnel were allocated a share of accountability for each other’s goals, and the entire team as an entity was compensated based on 360-degree performance evaluations.

Sales personnel roles were realigned with a customer-oriented growth emphasis and competitive displacement number. The organization’s transparency grew, some personnel adjustments occurred, and the company witnessed rapid rises to market share and profit increase.

Calibrated metrics increase an organization’s flexibility and effectiveness, and reduce monitoring and planning costs.