Performance Management: 5 Key Steps to Follow

5 Steps to Implement a Sales Performance Management Solution

Performance management can be intimidating: in the business world, ‘performance’ is often associated with sales KPIs and stressful reporting.

However, sales enablement is not just about management by numbers. It allows your sales team to improve its performance while revealing individual talents.

Discover the 5 steps to implement performance management within your organization.

Step 1: Audit your Sales Practices

To change your sales team’s methods, tools, and habits, you must first identify its current processes.

Four elements will require in-depth analysis:

• Your customer and prospect files;
• The prospecting and sales methods (social selling, lead scoring, etc.);
• The prospecting and sales tools (digital channels, CRM, marketing automation, etc.);
• The content of your website.

Once you have identified all these elements, you can identify their strengths and weaknesses to improve them — or get rid of them.

Step 2: Let your Customers Choose for You!

Among your company’s offerings, there are certainly best-sellers, offers that appeal to most of your customers, and neglected offers, offers that no longer seem to pique the curiosity of your prospects.

Check the views for each landing page on your website. Those with the lowest click-through rate (coupled with the highest bounce rate) are your neglected offers.

And if your customers have abandoned them, why keep them? Streamline your offerings, but do it smartly: let your customers and prospects choose for you!

Step 3: Optimize your Customer and Prospect Files

What do we mean by “optimize” customer or prospect lists?

First of all, you need to get rid of lists you haven’t used for a while. Do the same for long-inactive prospects.

Next, you will need to prioritize your prospects so that your sales reps can easily place them on a typical buyer’s journey and know what action to take.

Step 4: Align Performance

Performance can be understood in several ways. For a business leader, it often means “financial results.” For a marketing manager, it will translate into your company’s brand awareness and reputation. And for a salesperson, it will correspond to the number of sales made.

Marketing automation tools like HubSpot can help you get an overview of your company’s overall performance, both commercially and from a marketing and financial perspective.

Test these tools internally with your teams. Lead the change smoothly (internal link: “Sales transformation: how to get change accepted in my sales organization?”), and stay attentive to the needs (expressed or unexpressed) of your sales reps.

Step 5: Measure the Change!

Sales enablement is not a one-off management method. To bear fruit, it must be conducted long-term and constantly adjusted.

To make the necessary adjustments for your teams’ progress, you will need to measure their results and identify both successes and difficulties.

Remember to define sales KPIs beforehand, which you can choose to share with your team in real-time or during a weekly review. These measurements should serve to initiate discussions and improvements, and not to penalize the results achieved.

Performance management is based on a simple principle: it is always possible to help your team progress, provided you are curious enough and open to change.

You can help your sales reps improve their performance by downloading our new White Paper on sales performance management in the digital age