Why Sales Performance Management Is Important
How can you drive better business results when you have nothing to go on but guesswork – instead of accurate, real-time data on how employees are performing? Too often, the challenge of increasing business effectiveness to coax greater revenue is treated like an art instead of a science.
Here’s what stands in the way of achieving better performance:
- Inability to align sales with corporate initiatives: employees and channel partners don’t have a clear understanding of how they’re being measured and compensated. As a result, sales days will be lost due to shadow accounting and handling disputes
- Changing systems to reflect new sales initiatives: systems that are inflexible and costly to change
- Inability to plan and model effectively: forecasting incentive compensation spend and modeling territories on multiple spreadsheets, often with outdated-of-date information
- Inability to analyze performance and make mid-course corrections: no way to identify opportunities, make timely mid-course corrections or pre-empt financial surprises
Sales Performance Management (SPM) offers you a framework to plan and model sales strategies and ensure timely execution of sales initiatives, while giving both front-line sales people and decision-makers visibility into performance:
- Compelling and measurable sales incentive plans that positively influence sales behavior
- Better sales targeting through an understanding of market trends, and better targeting of sales across territories
- Better management of sales resources to target higher revenue-generating activities
- Greater sales satisfaction through faster deployment of sales plans, and more equitable territory and quota management
- Reduced sales turnover and improved productivity by fair allocation of sales opportunities
- Timely and realistic quota setting with reduced risk of attainment shortfalls, or un-forecasted sales compensation exposure
