A a front-line sales manager, you have a critical role. A group of great salespeople will underperform if you aren’t a strong manager.
That being said, when you become a sales leader, one of the most important things you need to understand is how to effectively manage your team.
Many sales leaders embrace key performance indicators (KPIs) to help drive strong sales performance. But you can also use KPIs to become a better manager. Here’s how:
3 Reasons Sales KPIs Make Better Sales Managers:
1. They give you better visibility into sales performance.
Take the time to identify the right KPIs for your organization. Talk with your sales team and managers to determine which activities are really meaningful for your sales process.
KPIs are unique to every company and every role. When defining them for your team, make sure they are based on actionable and controllable behaviors.
At a senior level, you’re codifying which metrics you’ll run your sales organization on.
Once you define KPIs and ensure your whole organization is aligned on the metrics, observe and track these numbers every day. This way, you can see where your team is in real time, instead of waiting until the end of the quarter.
If your team is falling behind on any individual KPI, you can find out right away and motivate them to focus their attention on catching up. Or if your team is way ahead of goal, give them recognition, along with the drive they need to keep performing.
2. They help you understand who needs coaching.
Make sure to track each rep’s KPIs on an individual basis too, so that you can identify gaps. Most common for tracking, include CRM dashboards, leaderboards, or even individual scorecards.
Of course, the sales number will be you and your team’s ultimate metric, but it’s important for modern sales leaders to coach around the activities that lead to revenue, as well. This will give you and your reps more control over getting to your number.
For the top sales performers on your team, this may not be an enormous change, because they are already closing deals. But, most likely, about 60 percent of your team is made up of middle-level performers — the people you really want to motivate and coach here.
3. They create more structure and value for 1-on-1 meetings
Set a weekly or bi-weekly meeting with each of your sales reps. Before each meeting, take at look at his or her metrics. Take note of which ones they’re ahead on, as well as where they are falling behind. Bring these metrics to the meeting so you can learn what they are doing to succeed or try to understand what’s getting in their way.
Too often nowadays, one-on-one sessions between sales reps and their leaders aren’t a priority because the parties involved don’t feel like they get anywhere. Meetings get canceled, then rescheduled, then canceled again.
For the modern sales leader, the one-on-one meeting is a critical thing that has to happen. If it for any reason gets canceled, it definitely gets rescheduled. That meeting needs to have a very common structure, where the salesperson comes with an agenda of topics to cover, and you comes with the metrics that will be discussed.
Are you interested in learning about other ways to build a high-performance sales team? Don’t miss our upcoming webinar where sales professionals will answer your questions live during the session:
