What is Sales Performance Management?

Sales Performance Management (SPM) is the discipline of marrying performance data with business improvement processes in order to drive sales effectiveness. At its core is the practice of incentive compensation management and business impact grows when other critical processes are added, such as territory & quota management, analytics & dashboarding, and coaching.

In smaller organizations, Sales Performance Management can be executed by good managers and analysts. In large, multi-channel sales organizations, there can be significant data and organizational obstacles to ensuring effective Sales Performance Management execution and overall alignment. Sales Performance Management solutions readily address these challenges by enabling sales operations to automate the commissioning process, leverage metrics, reports, analytics and dashboards, plan territories and quotas, and use workflow features to clarify goals, align the organization, uncover opportunities and improve business results.

How can Sales Performance Management improve your sales organization?

Many sales organizations are unable to effectively and efficiently execute on improvement initiatives (such as sales transformation or cost reduction) because success requires coordinated calculations, behavior change and alignment across all sales functions. Misaligned incentives, lack of front line visibility into performance and inability to put individual sales rep goals and incentives in context with organizational objectives are just some of the reasons sales organizations struggle when executing improvement campaigns and adapting to changing business needs.

Sales Performance Management helps organizations uncover and fix performance shortcomings. Sales Performance Management initiatives deliver high ROI for operations and produce a typical time-to-pay-back of 6-9 months.

Example customer results include:

• 14% increase in sales
• 37% decrease in operating expenses
• 5% close rate improvement

Results are achieved by taking advantage of four major opportunities:

1. Increased Salesperson Productivity and Revenue Generation

Driven by:

• More effective variable pay and incentive programs
• Retention of staff as a result of transparent objectives and improved supervisory management
• Increased self-correction through frequent viewing of performance data
• Increased sharing of best practices from top employees to developing teammates

2. Increased Supervisor Effectiveness and Efficiency

Driven by:

• Higher impact management of teams, channels and regions
• Reduction in administrative activities, such as data gathering for coaching or performance appraisals
• Manager and director transparency into Supervisor performance and effectiveness

3. Improved Analyst Performance

Driven by:

• Substantial time savings due to automated data integration and cleansing
• Business-driving insight resulting from focus on analytic tasks vs. repetitive report generating tasks
• Improved strategic decision making process stemming from - "one version of the truth"
• Identification of and focus on true business drivers and metrics rather than easy to access data

4. Greater Executive Impact

Driven by:

• Ability to execute on compensation plan changes at the speed of business
• More fact-based, data-driven decisions from sales analytics
• Performance-based environment without subjectivity or perception of management bias; a culture of accountability
• Transparency into performance of the business, across all roles and departments

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