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4. Targets, goals and KPIs With a clear sales process tailored to their individual business, a Sales Director should be able to identify relevant and effective KPIs for their teams. Few things are more fundamental than ensuring that salespeople know what is expected of them and checking that they are actually doing it. In high performing sales organisatons, Sales Directors review individuals’ sales pipelines regularly and check that they are delivering on high payoff sales activities. They need to hold salespeople accountable, and salespeople should welcome that. Lars Tewes points out that professional sportsmen actively want to be tracked and monitored and the same should apply in the sales function. “A salesperson who doesn’t want to be measured isn’t a professional salesperson.”
December 2016) but suffice it to say that they will not respond well to the old-fashioned sales manager approach of using KPIs as a stick with which to beat salespeople who don’t meet their numbers. The use of targets and other measures of performance has to be constructive and go hand-in-hand with coaching, training and development. KPI principles Most companies will already have a set of sales KPIs and if they don’t there’s no shortage of resources to help create some generic indicators. This is not the place to try and reinvent the wheel but below are some general principles around sales KPIs, including some thoughts on areas that are relatively new with the advent of the digital sales model. Much of this might be ‘Sales 101’ to many CEOs but it’s a critical part of the role of the Sales Director in itself, and also because it links directly into some of the key principles underpinning the job. Strategic KPIs Historically, few KPIs were directly linked to the strategic plan. But they are important because they place salespeople’s activities into a broader context, looking at their performance relative to the size of the overall market rather than just in absolute sales value terms. Without that, it’s impossible to properly assess a salesperson’s abilities. Prospects in the Sales Funnel
Anybody hiring a Sales Director needs to look for an individual prepared to do the hard graft of performance management. It is not the most glamorous activity and monitoring and managing a sales team requires a particular mindset. In the words of Matt Garman: “Systems and process – that’s what it’s all about. If it doesn’t get done, it’s because it’s hard work, it’s boring and time-consuming.” This is another reason why the best salesperson may not make the best Sales Director. Many top salespeople are more instinctive than process oriented, the type of character unlikely to warm to the relentless work of performance management. But for tracking to be effective, KPIs have to be used appropriately. This is particularly important when an increasing proportion of the workforce is drawn from the so-called ‘Millennial’ generation. We discussed the attitudes that characterise those born between 1990 and 2000 in the last issue of VQ (‘The Future of Work’,
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The definition of prospects in the sales funnel is that they are people that you have in some way engaged with. It could be because they have had a phone or email conversation or met with a
Profile – Matt Garman Matt Garman is founder and CEO of Sales Plus Profit. Matt successfully built and exited two IT businesses and has since cultivated a network of influential Director/ Senior Management contacts from all over the UK. As founder of Sales Plus Profit, he turns his passion and experience towards helping businesses achieve their real potential. With his trademark passion, expertise, and roll-up-the-sleeves work ethic, Matt enables owner-led businesses find, and leverage, their own adventures and opportunities.
Contact W: www.salesplusprofit.com
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