The components of a successful sales performance management system include, first of all, having well defined revenue plans and revenue and margin objectives. Often times, this includes having bookings objectives for your individual sales people, having well defined sales territories relating to those targets, and of course, having a strong, well documented plan, in terms of who your target markets and customers are within your territories.
In addition to having a revenue plan, other components of the sales performance management system include a job description that is expectation based where the outcomes are clearly defined are very important in terms of overall requirements for success in the job.
The next component of successful sales performance management system is actually having individual revenue margin and booking objectives for each of your people. Typically, this is done on an annualized basis with your people going through a planning cycle once you’ve defined your overall company’s revenue plans. You should put together targets, annual revenue and bookings goals for each of your salespeople that are tied to that overall revenue plan. And often times you’ll be doing a measuring and monitoring of performance relative to those actual revenue goals systematically on a monthly or quarterly basis in addition to that.
The next element of a successful sales performance management system is having an annual territory plan that your salespeople are working towards. This territory plan should be developed in concert with sales management in your sales people and it should list not only your major objects but also key accounts that you’re targeting, the strategies to get into those accounts, and it should probably have a section about both new business development as well as account maintenance or account management , and also have a section related to actual channel management strategies that your sales people are going to be carrying out. This is a one page document that can be put together in a template and passed out to your salespeople and used as a tool for them to conduct annual sales planning.
Again, having a plan in place allows you to use that plan as a tool for measuring and monitoring performance against that plan and having ongoing discussions with your sales people related to how they’re progressing against the objectives and the overall plan that they’ve set at the outset of the year.
The next element of a successful sales performance management system has nothing to do with actual goals objectives or plans, but everything to do with sales management’s role in working with individuals on the sales team. This is the most critical element. Salespeople are only as good as they are being managed by sales management. A lot of companies expect salespeople to be left at their own devices, but just like any other team, sales people need to be managed and the foundation for that, of course, is having somebody in place in your sales management function who is willing to work closely with their people.