Winning Sales Performance Management – No Analytics Needed!

3 minute read

The toughest job in sales belongs to the frontline sales manager – the vital final link between the company and the sales team’s interaction with the customer. For a company to grow, the sales management function must be effective. But sales managers are pulled in so many directions, by different people, it’s hard to focus on sales performance management.

Even when they find the time, it’s almost impossible to get the insights they need from the mass of data in Salesforce and the reports from their analytics systems.

Sales PerformanceSales managers deserve so much better.
So what’s the answer?

My latest publication ‘Winning Sales Performance Management – No Analytics Needed’ addresses this problem. The book was written to help sales managers achieve optimum sales performance from their teams.  At the end of the day, that’s what really matters.

While revealing all the best practices for sales managers, this book also shows you how innovative software, created to solve this problem, can help you drastically improve your sales performance.

In the book, I follow Kelly, a B2B Sales Manager in the American Midwest. Like all sales managers, Kelly is anxious to improve her team’s performance and to hit her targets (or exceed them) for that quarter. But she’s also stuck in the difficult position of juggling all of her tasks day-to-day, working out how to set her team’s KPIs and how to respond to changes in the pipeline..

For Kelly, these problems are solved through a combination of improved strategizing, streamlining the way she does things to cut out common tasks that yield poor results, and, crucially, better use of technology: the right software, that filters and translates the right data.

In the book, we follow her challenges; her struggle to see through the fog of information overload to gain better visibility of the sales forecast and pipeline. And we charter her success.

To do this, I lay out the tools that Kelly – and that every sales manager – needs if they are to keep things plain sailing. The cadence of best practices that can (and should) be implemented on a daily, weekly, monthly and a quarterly basis.

You see, we think that the sales management problem is not a deficit of data, but a deficit of insight. You can only get the right answer if you know the right question. So we ask the essential questions to frame the problem.

5 Key Sales Performance Management Questions

  1. What is the best cadence for managing my sales business?
  2. How can I understand the sales performance KPIs in my business?
  3. Can I reduce risk and avoid surprises to make my sales forecast?
  4. Are there enough real deals in my pipeline? Where are the risks?
  5. QBR: What happened to my forecast/pipeline last quarter?

Great sales managers know that they can’t succeed without applying proven sales management practices that work day in, day out in the trenches. Through our engagement with hundreds of companies and thousands of sales managers, we’ve certainly learned a thing or two about what works, and what tools are needed.

As a sales manager, no doubt you’ll empathize with the problems we delve into and I very much hope you see value in our considered point of view.

Download your own copy of Altify’s Winning Sales Performance Management eBook and let me know your comments.

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