How did your sales team do last quarter?
Inspect what you expect
Corporate performance reviews are a way of life. Whatever your company calls them: annual reviews, employment reviews, performance assessments, career development reviews, talent reviews, or any other term – they are part of a cycle we go through every year.
With sales teams – it’s different. It should not be annual – it should be quarterly. This is how we’ve run it at every company I’ve been at, and I think it’s an important part of our process for developing a healthy and high-performing sales team.
Why do we do this? To make sure that we identify issues that we can address in a timely fashion – and to make sure that we are acting quickly if there have been hiring mistakes or significant changes in performance.
There are three key areas that we review:
Key Performance Metrics: total bookings vs target (attainment %), win rate, forecast accuracy, pipeline conversion, time to close, average deal size, self-gen pipeline development, deal aging
Sales Excellence Metrics: % of training sessions completed, # of hours in training/enablement systems, certification scores, activity metrics (# of phone calls, first sales calls, SAL-SQL %)
Leadership assessment: quarter highlights, quarter lowlights, strengths, weaknesses, development areas, specific actions
PERFORMANCE METRICS:
Starting with key performance metrics – it’s helpful to have a snapshot of the whole team that looks something like this:
The numbers are good – but what I typically ask my team to do is color code it so I can see where the variations are more easily. When someone has multiple red, yellow or very light green areas – I want to drill into these.
Looking at a snapshot in time is useful – it’s for every individual person – it’s really important to go look at their trends over time. It’s also very important to compare the group and see how it’s trending over time. Let’s take attainment as an example:
We can see that Arnold has been generally having a solid year and seems to slowly be moving up and to the right. But how does that compare to the rest of the team?
Here’s an example where a picture is worth 1,000 words (or numbers)
In a chart like this – it’s easy to spot that we have two reps that have clearly been on the wrong path – time to dig into what’s going on with those two reps!
We should look at every metric like this – snapshots of the teams and then performance over time. That’s how you spot the issues.
SALES EXCELLENCE METRICS:
We get out of our sales team what we put into our sales team. Driving sales excellence and continuous improvement is essential to a high-performing sales team. In addition to the raw performance numbers outlined above, it’s essential to know how our sales teams are doing in terms of attending training, how much time they spend doing self-learning, and how well they know the material through certification.
We measure and compare the items in this section just like we do above and have robust debates about people’s performance in this area. Is their lack of attendance in training correlated to poor attainment numbers? Are they not progressing deals because they don’t know how to handle objections properly? What is our training team observing about their behavior that needs to be fed back to them through sales leadership? This quantitative and qualitative feedback is a critical part of the quarterly sales team review.
LEADERSHIP ASSESSMENT:
Coming into each quarterly review we ask the sales director to put together a single slide on each sales rep that we use for the remainder of the discussion after we’ve reviewed the performance and sales excellence information. What do we ask for? Here’s a snapshot of a slide format we use:
This is where we spend the bulk of the conversation on each sales rep. We ask each sales leader to have 2-3 bullets in each section on every rep – and after we collectively reviewed all of the prior metrics.
This does a couple of things:
It makes the sales director take the time to clearly think about where the sales rep really is in their career and performance
It makes the sales director clearly think through what we as an organization can do to help make that sales rep more successful (we win together as a team!)
It level-sets everyone (sales leadership from CRO on down, RevOps, HR) on where the rep really is
Last – it gives us a documented and agreed-upon set of actions that we track and can make sure progress is happening
The end goal is to help identify the things we can do as an organization to make our sales reps more successful. If the rep seems to be on the wrong path, we have one of two options. The first is to put them on a PIP (performance improvement plan) if we believe we can help them get turned around. If we don’t think that’s the case of the rep doesn’t seem willing to engage in help, then we make plans to exit them from the business.
We do this every quarter. It’s important to do honest assessments. It’s better to identify issues and fix them – or if a person really isn’t a good fit or fixable – to exit them.
So who should be involved in this quarterly meeting?
CRO
Sales VP of the rep being reviewed
Sales Director of the rep being reviewed
HR representative covering the sales team
Sales Excellence (or Enablement) leader
Sales Engineering (SE) Leader
RevOps leader
This is a serious time commitment every quarter and it’s critical that each of those teams provides feedback into this process.
How do we run the meeting?
The first few times you do this it will undoubtedly take longer than you expect. It’s important to have time discipline when running these meetings. I typically budget 5 minutes of discussion per person and tack on 5 minutes on the front and back ends for any follow-up or run over. So if we’re reviewing a team of 5 reps, that would be 5x5 + 5 + 5 = 35 minutes.
Start by having the sales director talk about the overall performance of the team with the core metrics slides. How did the team do overall, what were the highlights and lowlights, and what key lessons learned.
Then have the sales director go into each rep. If they are a high-performing rep – either skip them or spend a maximum of two minutes total on them (really focused on any areas of improvement or help needed from the team). It’s the lower-performing reps where you want to spend the most time. What’s causing the issue? Lack of pipeline? Focus? Lack of engagement with a channel partner? Challenges in engagement? Try to identify the core issues – and most importantly – discuss the action plans that the team needs to engage on and what you will measure 4 weeks out.
We do this like clockwork at the end of every quarter and I would suggest you do the same. At every company I’ve been at – at least 1-2 people/quarter end up on a PIP or being exited from the business. It’s brutal but important. We want to make sure we’re focused on having the best possible sales team that we can.
As always – ending with a picture of Ollie. He found a new couch to hang out on for a few days!
As always - if you have topics of interest or questions - I’d love to hear from you!
Best,
Steve