Are you a business owner? Would you like to know how to evaluate the performance of your sales representatives? Read on to learn more.
When your sales team consistently hits their targets, everyone’s bills are paid, and the business’s bottom line is fulfilled. To consistently deliver on your objectives, you need to measure and track your sales representatives’ ongoing performance.
However, most business owners are often caught up in the minute details of how every salesperson is performing. This will not only waste your time, but also get you nowhere. The best way to evaluate the performance of your sales representatives is to look at the team as a whole.
While this may seem like a lot of work, the results are worth the effort. Read on for a step-by-step guide to help you evaluate your sales representatives’ performance:
Check and Measure the Process
Evaluating your sales reps’ performance is a results-driven job. Hence, focusing more on the process instead of the final results may sound counterintuitive. However, for outstanding sales results, you will need a proper sales funnel to guide your potential clients through every step of the sales process.
The sales funnel should include essential touch points in the customer’s purchasing journey.
These touch points consist of:
- The initial point of contact or the first customer inquiry
- Initial communications to help your sales reps determine the client’s needs
- More meaningful conversations to help build a relationship between you and your brand
- The final process of closing the sales
All these stages are essential to the customers and your brand. If a sales rep misses any of the steps, the customer may not go through with the sale. Therefore, it’s imperative to evaluate your team’s performance throughout each selling stage.
When evaluating the process, you might notice gaps in some of the stages. In most cases, the best closers often struggle with the sales funnel process, especially the early stages of initial customer contact. On the other hand, you may realize that some of your low-performing sales reps are great at initiating conversation with customers during the primary stages.
Evaluating your team’s process instead of the final results will help you identify individual strengths. This means you can place each individual where they are most comfortable, thus improving your business’s bottom line.
Promote Prospecting
Prospecting is one of the most hated jobs by sales representatives. Over 40% of salespersons say that prospecting is the most challenging part of the sales process. No one likes making cold calls or making uncertain first sales steps hoping that they will find a new customer.
With this reluctance, it can be quite challenging to find a sales representative who enjoys sales prospecting. However, if you turn prospecting into a niche role within the sales department, it will be easy to find people good at it.
Look at the sales reps who have difficulty building long-term, meaningful relationships with clients or closing a sale. They could have the right energy level and relentlessness to keep calling potential clients to sell them your products. You should also consider incentivizing and rewarding sales representatives who like doing work that others don’t want to.
Consider Reward Training
Most business owners have confidence in the 80/20 sales rule. This rule stipulates that over 80% of a business’s sales come from 20% of its sales representatives.
If the 80-20 rule applies to your sales team, you might be tempted to let the top sales representatives keep bringing in money. However, this is a major mistake that most sales managers make.
Don’t just evaluate your top sales team based on their final sales. Talk to them to help you create a sales training program based on their best sales practices that you can share with the sales team. This way, you can capitalize on their strengths and improve the team’s overall performance.
All sales representatives need to work as a team towards a similar objective- your company’s bottom line. Therefore, ensure you enlist the help of your top salespeople to help you train the rest of your team. Find out what they are good at and their strategy to succeed, then ask them to train their fellow sales reps.
Set Sales Metrics and Goals
You can’t start reviewing the performance of your sales reps without setting the performance metrics. An essential metric to consider is the revenue they bring in. How much your sales reps are selling is often the difference between a successful business and a failing one.
However, the number will depend on the time of year, your industry, and the type of products or services your company sells. But all this will count towards your business bottom-line. You can start by setting the revenue you’d like the team to attain collectively, then break it down to individual goals.
After setting the revenue, you can set the compensation amount, incentives, and sales quota goals. These are essential aspects to help you better measure your team’s income as well as their productivity. And the primary indicator for boosted productivity will always be the total revenue the team brings in.
Set Regular Performance Reviews
Regular sales rep performance reviews will encourage accountability in your company. Most sales managers often prefer annual, quarterly, or monthly reviews and avoid weekly reviews. If you choose to do a weekly sales rep performance measurement, you can quickly and easily identify issues in the sales funnel.
That’s because monitoring performance after a short period will make it easier to identify problems. It will also be easy for you to come up with solutions to address any issues you encounter when creating your team’s sales strategy.
Weekly reviews, whether formal or informal, are a great addition to your sales strategy. However, there will be many variables, especially if your industry has a high-velocity sales environment.
Are You Ready to Evaluate the Performance of Your Sales Representatives?
Evaluating the performance of your sales team is one of the best ways to ensure they succeed. However, building an environment that facilitates their success can be a challenging task. Fortunately, you can create an environment that supports your sales representatives’ success using the above guide for sales rep performance measurement.
Additionally, you can contact OSX Sales Solutions at (404) 245-3775, and we will help you build the right sales strategy to ensure success. We have a team of highly qualified professionals who can help you set challenging yet realistic goals for your sales representatives. We can also give your team the support they need to keep succeeding.