When companies purchase CRM systems like salesforce.com, they are investing in the idea that if they can just measure what’s happening in the marketing and sales process, they can motivate what matters. They could:
- Create alignment to their growth plans. Quotas go up every year, but that doesn’t mean marketing spend and staffing does too. Leaders need to figure out how to get more out of what they already have by optimizing performance and tightly executing against the plan. This means identifying the sales goal and working backwards to the daily behaviors needed from your team – how much pipeline needs to be created, how much of certain products to sell, getting meetings with the right potential buyers, and improving follow-up and conversion rates from marketing lead to qualified opportunity.
- Create visibility into performance. There are multiple roles on any sales team. This often includes roles such as lead generation, small business sales, mid-market sales, enterprise sales, and account management. Each team will have their own performance metrics, and leaders want visibility into how the team is performing against their goals so they can accelerate, and course correct, when needed.
- Be agile. There’s always some new initiative going on such as a new product launch, hot new leads to be pursued with urgency, or a customer event that you quickly need the team rallied around to drive attendance. Or sometimes performance against the primary metrics mentioned above is out of line and you need everyone focused on getting things back in line. This is where you see tactics like contests and spiffs come into play.
- Help people get better. When a sales organization can manage performance using metrics, it makes it much easier to coach people to get better. So rather than just pounding the desk to “go sell more”, leaders can diagnose where the problem lies so they can coach appropriately. And if you can make the metrics easily visible, salespeople can self-diagnose their issues and seek out help on their own… that’s basically sales management nirvana.
But sales leaders are lacking a way to manage all of this, which means they don’t have the control they always wanted, putting the sales plan (and their careers) at risk. It’s time for sales leaders to take control and run the sales organization they always envisioned. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the LevelEleven Sales Performance Platform. It will help you sell more, by keeping your salespeople focused on the behaviors that matter. We like to call it Fitbit for Sales.
We got our start at LevelEleven by making it easy for sales managers to create leaderboards and contests when they needed to spike some sales behavior. We added innovation, efficiency, and creativity to the oldest sales management trick in the book. And it worked – clients like Dun & Bradstreet, Akamai, DMN Media, CEB, and Dyn have seen 40% plus increases in the behaviors they needed to see happen more often, quickly resulting in more revenue. But we always knew that was just the beginning of our quest to help salespeople stay focused on the right things.
With the launch of the LevelEleven Sales Performance Platform, we bring an entirely new set of capabilities to market. Just like before, our software plugs directly into salesforce.com as your system of record for sales, marketing, and customer support, and creates visibility around your team’s performance.
Here’s what’s new:
- Identify your performance metrics. Give each sales team their own set of three to four key performance indicators (KPI’s) that align to your plan, and a suggested goal by day, week, month or quarter. Set unique goals by role, including team members who are onboarding versus those who are fully ramped.
- Personalized Goals. A manager might say they would like to see 10 new business meetings per week per salesperson. With personalized goals, a salesperson can say they want to go for 12 per week and we’ll give them real time visibility into how they’re doing against their own goal. This provides the ultimate in team buy-in to executing your plan.
- Performance Snapshots and Historical Analytics. Allow salespeople to view a simple to understand snapshot of how they are performing against their goals. Tap into each metric to get historical analytics of their performance over time and see trends of improvement.
- Role Comparisons. See more than just your own performance by getting a snapshot of how you are doing relative to others in your same role. This includes a summary view of team averages, as well as a ranked list of who specifically performs well at this metric so you can seek guidance and best practices.
- Executive Snapshots. Everything outlined above, available in a summary view across the team. Finally giving a sales manager, a VP of Sales, or a CEO and simple summary of “what happened back at the office today.”
- Accessible via Mobile, Tablet or Web. While goal tracking is important to help a salesperson or a manager know where to focus their time today or this week, by being available anywhere we can tap into those reflective moments when a salesperson is thinking about their own performance. Even if you have an inside sales team, they can pull up their performance metrics on their mobile device at any time they are thinking about how they can get better.
- Predictive Leaderboards. Since we’re now monitoring performance against your most important metrics, we’ll see that performance is out of line to tell you when, what, and who needs a boost. No more waiting until you notice sales are down to dig into what’s going on and trying to correct – because it’s probably already too late. We’ll tell you when performance is lagging, and what to do about it.
This is what executives always wanted when they purchased CRM, and the kind of personalization salespeople were hoping for as well. As one of our top clients shared with me when I gave her a sneak peek a couple months ago, “This makes me want to be a salesperson again.”
