Sales Performance Management

When you hire us as your Fractional Sales Manager, the duty of Sales Performance Management becomes all ours. As the business owner, you can be assured that we’ll manage performance up or, in some cases, allow performance to manage a salesperson out. In either instance, you won’t have to wonder if the company did its part to help a salesperson find success.

True to the title, sales performance management manages sales performance, both over and under-performance. Management is the key, which we provide and is our primary focus. To provide Sales Performance Management, we will focus on three sub-elements. We introduce and utilize our Sales Performance Management System, Processes, and Metrics to manage all our teams. 

A Poven Virtual Sales Performance Management System

Our Sales Performance Management System has been discovered and designed to be effective in a virtual shared management approach. Since 2006, we’ve been improving our approach. Most small businesses and consultants embraced virtual management during the COVID-19 pandemic. We have been practicing virtual fractional management since our inception. Our system is published in our Founder, Rene Zamora’s book, Part-Tiime Sales Management for Small Business Sales Teams. Our system includes the following sales performance management best practices:

Belief: We Believe in the sales team we manage, and when we lose faith, we check ourselves first and then address issues as needed. 

Expectations: We are relentless in clarifying expectations for all to understand. 

Accountability: We empower our sales teams to be accountable to the expectations they agree to. We then ensure we have reporting that allows accountability to be visible to all. Lastly, we address poor performance to enable growth or correction. 

Meetings: As a virtual team, we learned early on that facilitating engagement was even more important than during an in-person meeting. Each meeting, team, or individual aims to help salespeople sell more. 

Conversations: We believe people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, and that’s why we must build trust and show our team and peers we care about them and the business with each conversation. This opens the door for them to learn how much we know. 

Sales Performance Management Metrics Begin With Clear Expectations

Metrics is a method of measuring something or the results obtained from it. We will provide clear sales performance management metrics to manage the sales team and individuals, but first, we must dig deeper into the expectations of the whole role. Setting goals (a metric) is very important, and a senior team that is disciplined and proven might be all that’s needed. Still, at most small businesses, talent comes in at different levels of experience and discipline. The first part of defining sales performance management metrics is determining and documenting the most critical expectations of the team based on the individual roles, sales process, and desired outcomes.  

Define and document expectations: Sales performance management starts with clearly defined, documented, and understood expectations. These expectations lay the foundation for an accountable sales environment. This obvious step is often taken for granted once someone verbally or over email explains what is expected. These instructions are usually given individually and are shared differently each time. They are not shared differently intentionally. It’s human nature to alter an explanation if it’s not documented. The result is a salesperson working toward an expectation based on their interpretation.  What often follows is frustration with a salesperson and continued instructions delivered in pieces over time. With defined and documented expectations, all salespeople, new and veterans, have the expectations read, reviewed, and reinforced to ensure they understand. If a salesperson strays off expectations, we can “manage” them by referring to our documentation. The document never changes how it reads. The document and management oversight allows the salesperson to align any misinterpretations of expectations. This is part of the action of Sales Performance Management. 

Expectations we define and document: When we start with a new client, we “get in step” with current expectations, then define them in our “tuning up” stage. We focus on the following expectations to define our Sales Performance Management Metrics. 

• Company sales goals (revenue for new and existing business, product lines, and territories)
• Job Descriptions
• Compensation Plans
• Sales Processes (prospecting, nurturing, and sales cycle)
• CRM Usage
• Individual Sales Plan with Goals and Strategies
• Team culture

Measure and monitor expectations: To support an accountable environment and allow Sales Performance Management Metrics to be practical and objective, we develop reports, dashboards, and Individual Sales Plans to measure and monitor activity and results. Over time, we continue to dig deep and find ways to measure the quality of activity to improve sales performance win percentages. 

Sales Performance Management Process

Our Sales Performance Management Process includes conducting meetings, monitoring expectations, using our tech tools, and supporting continual learning and improvement. 

Sales Team Meetings: You can find more details on how we use meetings in our overall management system on the Meetings service page, but here is a snapshot. In our weekly sales team meetings, we monitor team results and learn from each other and outside resources. As previously mentioned, this is a weekly point of accountability. In addition, weekly team meetings support continual learning and improvement and reinforce expectations. 

One-on-one Meetings: These meetings are all about the individual and their development. They are where direct coaching and corrective feedback occur. 

Impromptu and Improvement Meetings: When a sales rep needs us to help improve their performance, we make the time. We make the time when we need to confront poor attitudes, activity, or results to improve performance. We do not micromanage or create daily contact with salespeople. Instead, we monitor results against expectations and coach accordingly. 

Owner Catch-up Meetings: We usually start these weekly, and they often taper off over time. The purpose is to keep us in sync with progress and challenges and hear from our clients what can help us in our role.

Account Management, Sales Pipeline, and Prospecting: These processes are defined during expectations and tuning up. They tend to evolve the longer we work with a team. 

Tech tools: The phone provider, email and calendar platform, and CRM are the most common tools each sales team uses. Having technical support to integrate the systems allows us to develop more reporting on activity and ease of input into CRM. Using the tools is another expectation and process defined so we can gain the most from all activities to support sales management performance.

Conversations: Expectations, accountability, and meetings set the stage for a better or worse conversation when coaching up or correcting poor performance. When the salesperson understands our intention is always to help them sell more and improve, they will listen to us better. To get to this point, we must gain their trust and be mindful of every conversation via text, email, or voice. This does not mean we worry about their feelings. Instead, we demonstrate our concern about what they are doing or not doing to be successful. It means we must be honest and objective about their performance against expectations and use reporting and their input to help them make improvement decisions.

In summary, we improve Sales Performance Management by clarifying expectations, creating monitoring systems to measure expectations, and coaching up or confronting poor results or activities to manage and improve performance.