Many organizations are held back because they focus on a single, massive, monolithic goal and lose sight of the granular steps they need to take to get there. 

On the flip side, when you break down that monolithic goal into a series of realistic precursor goals, it becomes that much easier to achieve the larger objective.

If you’re looking to learn about how to improve sales rep performance, you need to focus on letting your workers execute the right quantity and quality of gameplay. Do that, and as Bill Walsh once said, “The score takes care of itself.”

In baseball, the goal of every game is to score more runs than your opponent. But of course, runs don’t appear out of thin air. They’re the culmination of hits, walks, stolen bases, extra-base hits, and home runs. When sales leadership and managers focus on optimizing each of those categories, runs are the automatic result.

Which sales metrics should I set goals on?

In the digital age, it’s easier than ever before to collect data. But not all data is the same. 

In our baseball example, tracking and trying to optimize foul balls is unlikely to translate into runs. On the other hand, trying to maximize base runners would.

It’s important for your organization to identify the proper sales metrics to track, measure, and improve over time. By doing so, you can implement a data-driven sales approach that enables you to achieve better business outcomes.

But what sales performance metrics should you be focusing on? Every organization is different, but these metrics should get you thinking in the right direction:

  • Sales Development Representatives - email responsiveness rate, contacts touched per account, win rate on source opportunities, accounts touched to opportunity created ratio
  • Account Executives - win rate, average selling price, deal cycle, contacts touched per account, opportunity stage conversation rates
  • Customer Success Managers - win rate, renewal rate, net dollar retention

How can I use data to develop sales efficiency benchmarks?

Your organization is already collecting a ton of data. But if you don’t consume that data and formulate actionable insights, it doesn’t do you any good.

We created Atrium to automate analyzing rep data, putting all the insights you need to build a smarter business in one place. Once you have the right data, you can set reasonable, attainable goals that blend historical performance data from your middle and upper-middle reps with bottom-up modeling to figure out expected levels of future performance.

Of course, you’ll also want to balance your goals with industry benchmarks to make sure you’re not demanding too much from your team—or not enough. If you need help with benchmarking data, Atrium has you covered.

After you’ve set goals, be sure to publish them and distribute them with your team. In our experience, far too many organizations create goals and guidelines but don’t take the next step and share them with their teams in a way that holds them accountable. It ends up being a ton of wasted effort.

Once you share guidelines, your job isn’t done just yet. You also need to bake goal monitoring and KPI consumption into your operating cadence. 

With the right sales management tools in place, you can create comprehensive reports and robust visualizations that enable you to easily track progress at a glance. Seeing where things such as pipe, pipe hygiene, opp ownership, and ramping stand takes a few clicks.

What should I do with sales metrics when things go sideways?

If we’ve learned anything over the last year, it’s that the world can change dramatically overnight. Even if you’ve been relying on the same KPIs successfully for years, the economy can be upended at any time, and you’ll have to pivot accordingly.

Should you find yourself in such a situation, you need to determine new baselines that make sense for the new normal. Based on that information, you then need to create new goals and quotas and establish new baselines across the organization.

Unfortunately, it might take anywhere between 1-6 months to figure out what the new market reality is. So this isn’t something you can determine overnight. 

The good news is that, with powerful sales performance monitoring tools such as Atrium in place, you can keep track of how your team is operating under the new normal. You can then use that information to inform your new KPIs and measure performance against those.

How can I use sales performance metrics to achieve my goals?

In today’s always evolving world, it is critical for sales teams to use data to figure out the best way forward. The easiest way to do that is by investing in the right sales performance monitoring solutions that keep all the information you need to make the right decisions within arm’s reach at all times.

It’s impossible to see the big picture without the right tools in place. But, with the right tools in place, you can actually forecast the future and change it.

For more information on how purpose-built sales tools can help improve business outcomes, give Atrium a try and we will send you some free swag! Or schedule a call with us and we can show you what Atrium is all about. You won’t get these insights anywhere else!

Interested in a deeper dive in to setting and managing sales reps goals? Check out Atrium’s Masterclass: Setting SDR & AE Goals That Don’t Suck.