I started my career in progamming, but I had a brief detour to a call center where I learned a lot about sales. This led me to start Plecto where I eventually helped hundreds of companies track and improve their performance.
I recently saw a question on LinkedIn about how to work with feedback, performance reviews and development of sales teams. I thought this was a great opportunity to share in writing what I have learned and taught many people and companies the last 13 years.
I've learned a lot from many people, but I want to highlight Preben Braagard who taught me many of the concepts that I still use today and introduced me to the book How I Raised Myself from Failure to Success in Selling by Frank Bettger, which i highly recommend.
Tracking
The most important part of any improvement process is establishing the status quo. Now, knowing the revenue per person is probably already something you know, but we need to break it down into smaller chunks.
The right KPIs
Any result (eg a closed deal) is a result of a series of efforts. For instance, in an outbound sales team you might have the following flow:
Call -> Meeting -> Proposal -> Signed Contract -> Invoice
Now you might be tempted to measure your sales team by invoiced revenue, but that is also the hardest thing for them to influence. On the other hand, they are in full control of the number of calls they make. So what you need to do is figure out how many calls it takes, on average, to win a customer. It's quite easy. Take any month and calculate:
Number of meetings / Number of calls = Booking Rate
Number of proposals / Number of meetings = Proposal Rate
Number of signed contracts / Number of proposals = Close Rate
Now lets say you want to close 10 customers per month, you need:
10 / close rate / proposal rate / booking rate = Number of calls required
Follow Up
Now decide on ideally three to five KPIs you want to track and make sure they are visible where your people do their own - ideally huge TVs in the office. In my experience doing this for hundreds of teams, the sales manager usually wants to show the team too much. In my experience if you show 20 different KPIs people get lost and just don't care. Instead YOU are responsible as a manager to make sure they have the right focus and therefore limiting it to fewer KPIs.
Example from above:
Calls, Booking Rate, Proposal Rate, Won Customers
Then you have effort = number of calls, quality = booking and propsal rate and output = won customers
This is of course ideally done in something like Plecto that is real-time and sourced from your CRM system.
Now you might have some sales people who might need to look at specific KPIs only for them. Resist the temptation to add this KPIs to the common boards, so everyone also need to think about it all the time. Instead, you need to follow up on this on your one on ones with the specific person. If you use Plecto, you could use the feature called "performance agreements" for this.
Routine
Daily Check-In
I like to start everyday with a check in / standup meeting or whatever you decide to call it. Make sure you get everyone to commit their expected effort for the day (calls in our above example) and ask what deals they are working on. Also evaluate on the previous day's result vs expected effort.
Team meetings
Once a week you should gather your sales team and go through their entire pipeline. This will help you stay updated, be able to forecast revenue but just as important make sure everything is updated in your CRM and that your team is working professionally.
I also recommend monthly training sessions for your entire team where you bring up subjects such as product knowledge, sales psycology etc. You can bring in external people to help in case you are not comfortable doing it yourself.
One on ones
You should also have frequent one on ones. This could be anything from weekly to every four weeks, personally I do every four weeks but previously when we had a large sales team and a full time sales manager, it was every two weeks. The one on ones should have a clear agenda and be prepared by leader and employee in advance. I usually go with an agenda along the lines of:
- Effort
- Look at their KPIs about effort, evaluate their performance vs expectations
- There are also other ways to show effort, eg showing up on time, being flexible
- Focus
- Focus on the right customers, opportunities
- Belief
- Do you believe in yourself, the product, the business and the market? Otherwise it can be very hard to convince other people
- Competence
- Do you have the right product knowledge, sales knowledge etc
If you use Plecto, there is a very handy 1:1 system built in for this.
Other important points
1) CRM or it didn't happen. 2) The customer is not properly closed until they are onboarded and happy 3) The sales processes are not a guideline, it's the law. Following them is the basis of being on the team at all