As a sales manager, you’re always working to increase sales pipeline more efficiently and effectively. The goal is always to “do more, better” but your sales reps have quotas to hit for the quarter and only so much time in a day. Meanwhile, you have a whole team to keep track of whose performance directly impacts your company’s sales pipeline.
Perhaps you have trouble achieving consistency. Your sales team does a great job in spurts, with one week of peak volume followed immediately by a week of lower volume, sometimes due to reps experiencing burnout. This can lead to some members carrying the team while others lack motivation.
Others struggle to articulate team goals or performance, and sales reps and managers alike are left unable to predict if goals will be reached until the end of the week, month or quarter.
If this sounds familiar, you need a way to motivate and engage your sales team and improved visibility into their performance. That way you can all get back to building a strong pipeline.
LevelEleven has multiple features that will help you motivate & engage your team, understand whether your whole team is on track to meet their goals, and have visibility into how effective each individual team member is at meeting their goals. The sooner you accomplish this, the sooner you can start to strengthen your pipeline.
Sales Contests Encourage Healthy Competition
Salespeople are naturally competitive – it’s one of the traits that makes them so good at what they do. Leverage that with sales contests that encourage key behaviors that drive strong performance toward goals.
Specific contests you can run include “Call Till You Fall” campaigns to encourage reps to increase their call volume, contests that focus on who can get the most Live Connects in a week, and many others. No matter what kind of contest you run, it’s important to make clear the purpose behind the contest – what end goal your team is striving to reach while competing.
Another direction you can take with your contests is pipeline maintenance. It’s not just about increasing the number of prospects you feed into your pipeline – you also need to ensure the data is accurate! A “Clean The Pipeline” sales contest will encourage everyone to do their part in cleaning up old opportunities or prospects that are clogging up the pipeline.
To accomplish this, you should identify slow opportunities and any overdue opportunities currently in the pipeline. Then, award points to team members who move an opportunity up a stage in the pipeline, and to those who manage to close an opportunity.
For example, if a team member moves a deal to Closed-Lost status, award them 5 points. 10 points will be awarded for a deal that moves forward a stage in the pipeline, and 50 points are the reward for moving a stalled deal to Closed-Won status.
Competitiveness is the fuel that keeps the sales engines going. Sales people go the extra mile to fill the pipeline because they’re competitive by nature and, above all, want to win. This makes a sales contest a great motivator for building up your sales pipeline.
Performance Scorecards Provide Real-Time Insights
With solutions like LevelEleven’s Performance Scorecards, you can course-correct sooner when you see reps aren’t on track to meet their goals – rather than waiting until the end of the quarter to find out they’ve missed them. Scorecards empower sales and customer leaders with real-time KPI tracking and a summary of their team’s performance in real-time.
Ideally, sales reps should be able to instantly see how they’re performing against key metrics and goals with a Performance Scorecard, enabling them to focus efforts on key behaviors that drive performance. Meanwhile, sales managers can compare team members to quickly determine who is on track – and identify any performance concerns that need to be addressed asap.
If you want to build your sales pipeline, you need to first establish visibility into team performance toward goals. After all, you can’t improve something if you don’t even know there’s a problem.
LevelEleven Performance Index Improves Visibility
Imagine having a concrete number that offers a quick assessment of each sales rep’s overall performance toward goals. How much time do you think you could save if you didn’t always have to pull a report just to see where things stand?
That’s exactly what our LevelEleven Performance Index (LPI) score provides.
The LPI provides reps and managers with a holistic view of each team member’s performance against his or her goals. It provides a quick, reliable metric for understanding how well your team member is tracking to their goals.
The LevelEleven Performance Index calculates how an individual is performing against their assigned metrics on a 30 day rolling cycle, returning a score out of 250. This number is also used to rank co-workers against one another on a leaderboard that promotes healthy competition.
The result? Instant understanding of where your team stands.
It’s important that you not only feed the early stages of your sales pipeline, but that you also ensure your reps are moving prospects through the pipeline to later stages, ultimately closing the deal. The visibility you gain with a solution like LevelEleven makes it much easier to engage and motivate your team, manage sales reps’ performance, and monitor deal progression.
