How to improve the commercial performance of your team?

Sales Performance: Definition

What is Sales Performance?

Sales performance is a company's ability to generate revenue through the sale of its products or services. Sales performance is directly linked to business results and the company's ability to grow. Therefore, it's essential to work on it continuously.

It would be reductive AND destructive to believe that only the sales team is involved: recruitment, management, product, marketing, communication all play a role. It's also important to emphasize that sales performance isn't just about conversion rates from opportunities to customers, and certainly not just about revenue figures.

Why and How to Measure Sales Performance?

The factors that can explain insufficient sales performance are numerous, which is why you need to establish precise performance indicators to quickly identify problems.

However, too many indicators would be counterproductive—no need to create a dashboard that would make a NASA engineer pale! We've identified 9 key performance metrics that provide a clear view of your sales activity performance:

• Number of leads

• Lead distribution by channel

• Quality of generated leads

• Conversion rate

• Revenue

• Sales cycle length

• Customer retention rate

• Customer satisfaction or customer recommendation rate

• Upselling rate

For more details: The 9 Sales Performance Indicators to Track - Examples and Calculations.

Understanding the Complexity of Sales Performance

The indicators I just presented are highly effective for measuring your sales approach's operational health, but in reality, they create the illusion that only operational elements impact performance.

You need to understand that truly strong sales performance rests on three main pillars:

• The right sales strategy: How many sales teams fail due to haphazard, poorly conceived strategies?

• The right sales process: Sales has become more complex; without a well-structured sales process, you're leaving your performance to chance (yes, chance).

• Effective sales management: Managing a sales team is a very sensitive subject. Team motivation is a precious resource, and it's absolutely not enough to set "ambitious" goals paired with variable compensation.

3 Keys to Improving Your Sales Performance

Sales Strategy: Without Direction, No Sales Effectiveness

Sales development strategy is obviously essential to performance, since performance is judged relative to the initial strategy. But be careful—"having a strategy" and "having a good strategy" are two very different things.

Implementing your strategy will have a major impact on your sales performance, whether through goal selection, action plan choices, or allocated resources. How many times have we seen strategies that put all resources toward a target that has never proven real sensitivity to your offerings (I swear it's true).

How many strategies set objectives without allocating either resources or precise action plans? How many strategies have only signed revenue as their tracking metric?

Don't neglect this work. A strategy isn't simply a revenue objective or a simple PowerPoint pulled out once a year to show numbers that look good. It's an integral part of a complete, complex process that is business development.

Structuring the Sales Process

This is probably the most important point for your long-term sales performance. First, what exactly are we talking about?

Sales is a complex process that aims to identify a prospect, understand their problem, prove that you're best positioned to solve it, and agree on the value of that solution. So we have three major phases: Qualification, value proposition, and closing.

I'm deliberately excluding the upstream lead generation (prospecting, inbound marketing, or social media) and downstream customer retention and expansion to spare you a headache.

Despite this complexity, when you ask a sales team "what is your sales process?", you get 90% "it depends," and if you ask "depends on what?", you witness a shipwreck.

A sales process shouldn't be left to chance. When well-designed, it's the element that will have the most impact on achieving your sales objectives, and it's also through proper structuring that you can quickly identify your weak points and therefore improve.

For more information: How to Structure My Sales Process?

Sales Management and Training

Your most precious resource for achieving objectives is your sales team! You know that salespeople aren't exactly growing on trees, that they need time to become effective, and that they often must absorb enormous pressure.

The role of sales management isn't to add pressure or humiliate underperforming salespeople. I'm not saying this lightly, and I'm not exaggerating—this is exactly what happens most of the time.

This is counterproductive, and the Darwinian approach of hiring left and right while eliminating the "weakest" creates the illusion of effectiveness.

Your salespeople need to be trained. Talent has nothing to do with sales performance. Invest in them, and they'll return the favor. Beyond training, sales management should aim to preserve salespeople's motivation and morale because these two elements are extremely important for your performance.

Don't hesitate to check out our article on Sales Enablement, which gives you several approaches for supporting your sales teams daily.

Factors Influencing Sales Performance

As we indicated at the beginning of this article, it would be incorrect to believe that only the sales team and their sales process management impact your sales performance. Let's examine three key elements that will influence this performance together.

Your Marketing and Communication Strategy

Marketing and communication are important. They don't replace a good sales team, but they're essential to their effectiveness.

What you need to understand is that today, two-thirds of the decision-making process happens online, outside of contact with salespeople. During the sales process, your prospect will continuously research in parallel with your exchanges via search engines and social media.

This simply means that if you're not visible as a company during these searches, you're giving your competitors a wide-open boulevard.

But that's not all—a good inbound marketing strategy, for example, will bring enormous value to your prospects. This will allow your salespeople to be much more convincing and will significantly increase the perceived value of your offerings, ultimately allowing you to increase your margins.

Yes, salespeople are right to complain about nonexistent marketing when that's the case—it significantly harms their work. However, when this strategy exists, you must ensure it's well understood and used by your sales teams.

The famous Sales & Marketing alignment is absolutely essential. This is achieved by ensuring these two teams share common skills and have shared objectives.

Lead Generation Effectiveness

Lead generation is a very broad subject that, again, doesn't concern only salespeople.

There are numerous lead acquisition channels that are either more marketing-related or more sales-related. But one source isn't necessarily equal to another in terms of effectiveness or cost.

Example: Online Advertising

Generating leads through outbound marketing actions, like online advertising for example, is interesting because:

• It's a channel that allows almost immediate lead acquisition

• It's controllable based on your capacity to handle leads and orders. You just need to increase or reduce budgets

However, this poses several problems:

• You don't build long-term acquisition—the day you stop budgets, there's nothing left

• Acquisition costs are naturally increasing. It's a bidding system; the more players, the more expensive it gets for the same number of leads

• Leads are of mediocre quality in the vast majority of cases. They know little or nothing about you and often look for the lowest price. Worst lead on earth for a salesperson.

Example: Prospecting

The lead generation lever par excellence for salespeople—mastering it would make you a "hunter." Prospecting works and will always work for business development. It relies on identifying people highly likely to be interested in what you offer and triggering a meeting.

We often talk about cold prospecting. This technique has numerous advantages:

• It requires no major prerequisites or investment other than having a salesperson capable of doing it

• It's controllable—you decide if you need it or not

• Leads are relatively good quality since they've been carefully selected in principle

However, prospecting has certain weaknesses:

• It generally leads to fairly long sales processes since processes are initiated by the salesperson, not the client, who is therefore potentially less urgent in their approach (otherwise they would have initiated it themselves earlier)

• Acquisition costs are high—time spent by the salesperson can be very long to generate a few leads. Beyond time, the exercise isn't simple and has a potentially significant moral cost

• Prospecting automation tools, which have made the exercise appear simpler, have actually significantly altered prospecting ROI. Prospects are saturated with low-quality messages and end up not responding to anyone

Example: Client Referrals

Surely the most effective but hardest to control lever. It's a lever that can considerably increase your sales performance. If each client recommends you to another, growth is assured.

The advantages are numerous:

• Extremely high-quality leads generally—they resemble your client and are therefore likely to become one

• Leads who know you and have a positive bias toward you

• Leads who convert quickly

However, there's a prerequisite: having very satisfied clients. This is potentially slow growth—it's rare for a client to immediately recommend you to very many people.

Following these examples, you understand that a lead isn't always equal to another lead and that choosing your acquisition channels will impact your sales approach performance.

To discover other acquisition channels, we recommend our web story on the subject: Acquisition Channels to Use.

Structuring Your Offerings

Yes, ultimately we're selling an offering. If this offering has no value or is poorly designed, don't be surprised if your sales performance is poor.

Sometimes it has nothing to do with the product or service itself but rather how this product or service is "packaged."

Your product or service must therefore address your prospects' problems, do so within a timeframe and with delivery methods compatible with their needs and constraints, and you must be able to demonstrate its effectiveness.

Without this, it's much more complex, and it won't be a matter of sales competence.