The ongoing demand for sales teams to generate results is nothing new, but how various sales organizations go about accomplishing their goals differs significantly. Proactivity in the sales process might be the difference between mediocre and exceptional outcomes. Despite this, many organizations’ salespeople lack the tools they need to deliver the specific insights they need to succeed.
For sales representatives to select the proper course of action at the right time, a sales performance management system and accurate, timely data are required. We look at how a Sales Performance Management (SPM) solution can help world-leading manufacturers achieve this.
Data Challenges within Sales Departments
Consider the amount of data a company might have about a single consumer and where it could be stored:
- A customer relationship management system (CRM) that stores information such as contact information, customer interactions, current opportunities, and won orders to mention a few.
- Monitoring after-sales service delivery via a Customer Service platform.
- An ERP system that keeps track of past and present orders, as well as the assets that a customer has access to.
- A support system that has a database that stores information about customer support tickets and the status of those tickets.
This list is by no means comprehensive, but it does emphasize the wide range of potential sources of useful information for accelerating the sales process. Finding all this information is a time-consuming task for a sales representative, let alone analyzing. The many factors to determine the customer’s current position and the likelihood of purchasing something new.
As salespeople strive to monitor their pipeline and keep track of where their customers and potential customers are at. Various ad-hoc spreadsheets are likely to come into play, that will need regular manual updates and add to the time delays.
When you multiply the time spent by each sales representative by the entire size of the sales team. Inefficiencies emerge – not ideal when the team’s primary goal is to sell more products as quickly as possible.
What is Sales Performance Management?
According to Gartner, it is “A set of operational and analytical services that automate and combine back-office operational sales operations.” Sales performance management solutions make it easier for sales teams to better understand the entire sales process by bringing information together and automating time-consuming tasks. Managers have total visibility of how sales representatives perform across all business entities, allowing them to focus more on selling.
For sales performance management to be most effective, all pertinent customer data should be brought together in an ideal world, which may be accomplished with a single analysis, simulation, and planning solution.
What are the Benefits of a Sales Performance Management Solution?
Let’s look at the benefits of SPM using the example of a large electronics manufacturing company. The Board Decision-Making Platform was used to combine customer data across the company’s 25 operating companies. Which included 4.6 million customer records, 5 million sales activity, 750,000 open sales prospects. And over 9 million service activities.
The company previously had many strategies for the sales process in different countries as a result of earlier acquisitions. Making it impossible to acquire a complete view to drive sales performance.
Don’t Forget: What is a Sales Quota?
The company now has the following benefits as a result of using Board as a standardized SPM solution:
- Realized a 360-degree perspective of every customer with complete data from all data sources. Allowing salespeople and managers to quickly comprehend each customer’s profile without having to do any manual effort.
- Given each sales representative visibility into their pipeline and the opportunity to examine it. In depth using a set of key KPIs, indicating top opportunities to assist them in driving forward.
- Optimized the sales process to allow for easier comparison of sales performance and targets. As well as to assist sales representatives in identifying which customers to visit. And recommending additional activities to complete to meet assigned goals.
- Provided a user-friendly, consumable salesperson report, accompanied by weekly one-on-one meetings with management, highlighting important KPIs related to opportunity creation, wins, and pipeline, allowing salespeople to manage their operations more proactively and efficiently.
- Increased sales prediction accuracy by allowing real-time comparison of historical sales insights. And forecasts with actual results, resulting in continual improvement.
- Based on a combination of KPIs and feedback analysis from the previous six months of customer visits. They identified customers that require further attention.
These factors work together to revolutionize the entire sales process, bringing front- and back-office data together to boost sales performance.
The advantages don’t end there. In a top-down or bottom-up strategy. Sales performance management tools allow you to allocate sales targets across different regions, channels, sales agents, and product lines. Because of the connectivity between all data sources. This allocation can be done while taking into account both historical performance and expected forecasts, giving you total insight at all times.
The Bottom Line
Every company has access to a multitude of data on its customers and prospects. But it’s usually impossible to get at without a lot of human labor. Leadership teams may immediately empower themselves and their salespeople to access information by employing a sales performance management approach. This, in turn, increases the effectiveness of sales forecasting and reporting activities across the board by increasing transparency across customer accounts at every level of the sales pipeline.
