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How to Measure and Track Your Entire Sales Team’s Performance

Topics
Why You MUST Measure Your Sales Team’s Collective Performance
The Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking Your Sales Team’s Collective Performance
Step 1 - Set goals and expectations
Step 2 - Plan to measure both short and long term goals
Step 3 - Develop an up-to-date visual dashboard to consider every stage of the pipeline
Step 4 - Work smarter, not harder
Step 5 - Make the time to follow up with your team collectively and individually
The Smart Way to Make Sales Teams Work More Effectively

Hitting sales targets consistently pays everyone’s bills, including commissions and bonuses, and ensures the company’s bottom line is strong.

Measuring and tracking your team’s ongoing performance is the best indicator you have to consistently manage and deliver on your objectives.

You can’t afford to lose sight of the forest and see only individual trees.

When it comes to figuring out how to measure sales performance, step one is to get simple and clear visibility over your team collectively. This is far more effective than cobbling together the whole picture from a series of individual sales reps’ activities, which is a time suck.

Implementing sales tracking can seem like hard work, but it doesn’t have to be.

There are just a few practical steps you need to develop an effective way to measure, track and report on your sales team’s performance. Here’s a step-by-step process to help you monitor your sales force and keep their eyes on that clearly-defined prize.


Why You MUST Measure Your Sales Team’s Collective Performance

If a member of your team takes their eye off the ball you suffer a temporary setback.

But, if your whole team loses sight of the goal, it’s game over.

You’re the coach. If you want to win consistently, you need a seat in the stands with a bird’s eye view.

Measuring sales performance equips you with the right information to effectively conduct revenue forecasting. It also helps you assess how well you are implementing your sales strategy and highlights how your sales operations and workflows are going.

As a sales leader, you need to be able to realize when you need to reallocate resources or change priorities to avoid missing targets in your sales cycles.

You need to be able to manage expectations for your team.

You need to discuss factors that may not be related to individual sales productivity but are related to deeper issues, such as the competitive landscape or wider economic factors.

This helps reduce the inevitable tensions and stresses that are typically felt by salespeople. Collectively recognizing these issues also encourages your team to come up with creative solutions to problems and explore actionable steps to fix them.

Focusing on collective performance not only helps everybody keep the big picture top of mind, but it also encourages a sense of teamwork, unity and shared goals, which is highly motivating.

The benefits are clear, but you need a simple way to introduce collective sales tracking that does not add to your already heavy workload. You need a tracking software that is simple to introduce and maintain; something that helps you and your team work smarter, not harder.

And that’s exactly what we’re going to give you.

‘Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships.’
Michael Jordan


The Step-by-Step Guide to Tracking Your Sales Team’s Collective Performance

Setting clearly defined sales goals for your team helps you lay a strong foundation that you can build upon.


Step 1 - Set goals and expectations

Sales goals shouldn’t be mandated with Ten Commandments-style ruthlessness.

The best way to set sales team goals is to involve your team in their creation.

This way you have the chance to discover any potential obstacles that may arise. As a result, your goals are more likely to be realistic and your team will feel more motivated and invested in working to achieve them.

What are some of the sales KPIs that every team leader should be tracking to measure sales performance?

  1. Activity Metrics. These are sales activities and tasks that your sales reps undertake everyday including the number of sales calls, outreach emails, field sales visits, social media interactions, new leads acquired, qualified leads, demos, scheduled meetings and data entry into your CRM software.

  2. Pipeline Metrics. These metrics measure how well your sales pipeline is performing and include the length of the sales cycles, number of deals in the pipeline and the average deal size.

  3. Productivity Metrics. These sales performance metrics measure how effective your team is in their sales activities and include the win rate, lead response time, percentage of deals won and average customer acquisition cost vs. contract value and conversion rate.

  4. Results Metrics. These show the overall success of the efforts of the sales organization. Some of the metrics measured include quota attainment, customer satisfaction and retention, churn rate, customer lifetime value, number of new customers, revenue and customer onboarding process.

‘In high performing teams, the cost of speaking out is lowered, the cost of silence is raised.’ Nick Pope, Global Learning Director – Unilever


Step 2 - Plan to measure both short and long term goals

The most effective performance measures maintain a dual focus on short-term task completion and long-term performance. This mix of goals and incentives helps to promote a positive work ethic.

While weekly (or even daily) goals help keep your team on track, the inevitable ups and downs of sales can mean that demotivation quickly sets in. During these tough times, longer-term goals provide a more realistic measure of success.

Similarly, if daily and weekly goals are too easy to achieve, but long-term success is not coming to fruition, you’ll need to review whether these sales activities are actually helping everyone get the results that really matter.


Step 3 - Develop an up-to-date visual dashboard to consider every stage of the pipeline

Your sales team must be focused on more than just closing deals.

Every stage of your pipeline needs to be filled, which means that lead generation must be an ongoing activity. Additionally, lead scoring, qualification and nurturing must naturally follow. A robust lead management system is the bedrock of a good sales funnel.

But, it’s not a sales manager’s job to fill your pipeline: it’s your job to advise your team on how to fill it (and to understand how to know when it’s filled correctly).

You need a sales CRM with pipeline management and sales tracking tools equipped with up-to-the-minute reporting for each of your sales reps at a single glance.

Pipedrive’s customizable dashboards feature gives you tailored visibility of your sales pipeline so you can declutter your dashboard and track only the most useful sales metrics for your company.

How can you customize your sales dashboard with Pipedrive?

By using a sales team tracker, you can configure real-time metrics to develop a clear visual overview of your data - not only helping you to identify areas of improvement for your sales process, but also allowing you to simplify your sales cycles.

Here’s just a selection of the sales data you can choose to track in your customizable dashboard:

  • Snapshots of your deals - new, won, lost

  • Activities

  • Emails

  • Revenue and sales forecasts

Sales team trackers are agile, so you can even shuffle all of those options around in your visual dashboard and hide any options that aren't needed.

Download Your Guide to Sales Performance Measurement

The must-read guide for any sales manager trying to track, forecast and minimize risk. Learn how to scale sales with data-backed decisions.

This means you can start to understand exactly how the sales pipeline is flowing, and where problems are occurring.

With accurate metrics, that can be instantly visualized, you can improve your closing rate by pinpointing the areas where it breaks down.

Read our ultimate guide to sales dashboards to learn how you can use your insights to improve performance and hit sales quotas.


Step 4 - Work smarter, not harder

Many startups and small businesses start out tracking their sales performance on a spreadsheet. However, as you scale, a more robust sales monitoring system is required and the easiest way to do that is through sales automation.

Some managers create more work for themselves by developing an overly complicated system for tracking and reporting on their team’s performance.

The aim here is to streamline your team’s workload by making it more focused.

Pipedrive’s customizable sales reporting features allow you to quickly visualize the precise data you are interested in to assess your team’s performance.

You can see the number of new deals added, the average age of your deals, the number of open deals and stage-to-stage conversion for all of your deals in any time period. Applying custom filters to any report allows you to quickly and clearly see the exact data you need.


Pipedrive helps you automate the production of sales reporting, saving you so much manual administration time that you can spend on solving, rather than identifying, issues.


Step 5 - Make the time to follow up with your team collectively and individually

Data is meaningless unless it is actioned.

You need to share the insights you have gained with your team as a whole. The easiest way to do that is to leverage regular catch-up meetings as an opportunity to look at any new or recurring issues. Use this time to collectively troubleshoot solutions and share helpful workarounds.

Great teams do not hold back with one another. They are unafraid to air their dirty laundry. They admit their mistakes, their weaknesses and their concerns without fear of reprisal.’ Patrick Lencioni


It’s also important to make time to check-in with each person individually.

Use this time to sensitively discuss exactly how their performance compares against the team’s objectives and highlight any specific areas for improvement. Try and find out if the salesperson needs training, support or extra resources to meet any problems or challenges.

This meeting is an ideal way to avoid singling out one team member in front of the rest of the group. It’s also a perfect forum to help anyone who is struggling to bounce back after missing sales objectives over the previous sales cycle.


The Smart Way to Make Sales Teams Work More Effectively

‘When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.’ Joe Paterno


Sales monitoring should never be something you, as a manager, do alone.

You must do it in collaboration with your team.

These three steps are table stakes:

  • Make sure your salespeople are involved in setting team goals, determining targets and establishing KPIs.

  • Put in place regular catch-ups to discuss and evaluate their collective and individual performance.

  • Keep monitoring, but most of all keep talking!

Use this summary as the foundation for how to measure sales performance.

With the right reporting tools and a simple CRM system designed to help you monitor performance in real time, you can start working smarter and hitting those team targets with pocket-lining regularity!

Download Your Guide to Sales Performance Measurement

The must-read guide for any sales manager trying to track, forecast and minimize risk. Learn how to scale sales with data-backed decisions.

Driving business growth