Gauging Greatness: Which Performance Measures Are Worth Tracking?

You have the perfect sales strategy and some pretty awesome products. Now it’s time for your sales organization to make the sales. But not just any sales, the right products to the right customers to make the company a lot of money.

The sales compensation plan is the perfect way to motivate the sales organization. And peformance measures can track success or failure. Less is more here. The fewer – and the smarter – your performance measures are, the more success the rep and the company will have with the compensation plan and the overall strategy of the business. There’s a whole swamp of possible performance measures, and it’s helpful to have a few basic structures to frame your thinking.

1. Financial measures are the most important. These are the bank measures, the things that you see on the income statement: revenue, sales, bookings, profit, income or even units, depending on what type of business you are. If you had a compensation plan that measured only one thing, you’d want to have financial measures because they produce results for the business.

2. Strategic measures are second in our hierarchy. They can steer the performance of the sales organization’s strategy. They say, “We want to sell more but we want to do it in certain ways.” We want to sell certain types of products, or we have a certain type of product mix. Or we want to sell to certain types of customers. We want a certain contract length, so we want to sell more three- and five-year contracts than one-year contracts. Or, back to customer type. We want to do a better job of retention or managing our churn rate of current customer revenue. Or we want to do more in terms of customer acquisition. We tend to live off of our current customer accounts.

Strategic measures say, “Sell more but do it in certain ways.” If I had space in a plan for two measures, I would want a financial measure and I want a strategic measure, and that would be it.

3. Leading indicator. Some sales organizations are in a really long sales cycle, and the reps may not actually see revenue for a period of time. Or, the organization has new business developers out there building a base that will take some time to evolve, but we can’t pay them on revenue because it doesn’t really exist yet. So what do you do there?

Some industries — for example automotive and semiconductors — use leading indicators in their plan. They’ll find customer recognized types of measures that they can put in the plan to lead up to revenue.

In the automotive industry they’ll use a bench prototype as a leading indicator. For an auto part components company, a bench prototype would mean the customer is interested enough to ask for a prototype; and they’re probably going to be buying from you. So that’s a leading indicator we might actually pay the rep for.

What are the best performance measures you’ve used?

To learn more, visit SalesGlobe or email mark.donnolo@salesglobe.com.