How to Choose a Sales Performance Management Platform

By Steve Jensen

With the advent of the coaching technology stack for sales teams, Sales Performance Management (SPM) has become a critical component for increasing the performance, effectiveness, and revenue of every member of the sales team.  SPM is the practice of overseeing and guiding employees to improve their ability to sell more products or services. In conjunction with the CRM system, it forms the backbone of an organization’s coaching and improvement efforts.

A key objective of a Sales Performance Management Platform is to educate and motivate sales professionals to win more, fill pipeline gaps, hit goal more often, and achieve career aspirations. A good SPM should address coaching and tracking sales team members, analytics, projections, and reporting tasks.

Why You Need a Sales Performance Management Platform

There are many reasons you will want to have a robust platform that integrates with your CRM and other coaching tools. You need a tool which can manage salesperson performance, manage opportunities, and facilitate pipeline reviews and 1:1s.

A good SPM will track activities generated by other sales tools and tie them to individual goals. You also need it to track and manage coachability and have easy access to scorecards.

Choosing an App

Putting together a coaching technology stack that includes an SPM has become a necessity for the modern sales team. Choosing which solutions to include in a coaching stack is like the decisions that must be made for the overall sales stack.

First, you must consider what it is that you want to accomplish.  Are there specific needs or desired outcomes that you want to achieve? Any new technology that you introduce should solve a problem or improve efficiency. Never choose an app because others are using it. The decision should be based solely on your business case.

Second, Look at the health of the app supplier and ensure that their product roadmap will continue to meet your expectations and growth goals.

You should also consider:

  • How do you integrate each piece of tech into your existing processes?
  • How do they communicate?
  • How do they support your sales methodology?

Each of those concerns shows up in the selection of the technologies that are a part of your coaching stack. With that in mind, here are some guidelines you might want to consider when building your coaching stack and selecting tech for sales performance management:

  • If a solution can’t pass security requirements, none of its benefits are of any consequence. The most secure solutions reside natively within your CRM and don’t pass data in or out or store it anywhere else.
  • You should consider who will be using the platform: is it focused on the reps or the sales leaders? Their needs are different. The ideal platform would focus on both leaders and salespeople alike and function to enhance, simplify, and scale their work.
  • Make sure you choose a solution that meets your needs now and can grow with your team.

Important Questions to Ask

  1. How will your SPM tech integrate with your system of record? You don’t want to maintain two systems to take advantage of multiple feature sets.
  2. Is it built natively in your CRM (Salesforce, for example)? How will it communicate with your system? Speed and simplicity are the keys to working with multiple technologies.  Solutions built natively in your CRM are quicker, more secure, and easier to use.
  3. Will your SPM technology require extra time and work or education from your salesforce? Is it easy to use? The continual addition of new technology can become distracting for reps. If they are constantly asked to change their process or begin using a new tool, it could jeopardize your entire sales process. A good SPM should be as seamless as possible with as little additional work needed as possible.
  4. How will it be affected by the adoption of other technologies? Will additional pieces of tech play nicely with your existing stack? You don’t want to duplicate functionality or require redundant information-especially if your reps are required to enter information multiple times.
  5. How will your SPM platform support your existing sales stages? Or your methodology? Are there steps that will have to be abandoned or handled by an additional piece of tech? Remember, you are trying to scale your existing processes, not re-write everything you have. Your intent should be to enhance your process, not replace it.
  6. Will it appear seamless to the end user? The ideal integration would be one where it was difficult to tell where one piece of technology ended, and the next began. If you are using Salesforce, for example, is your SPM a tab inside the program? Can you edit opportunities from within the SPM without switching to your CRM?  The experience should flow from one application to the next without slowing down the salesperson in any way.
  7. As a platform, how will your SPM communicate and link with your other tech? Will activities that are tracked by other software be seamlessly updated? Will other assets be available from within the SPM solution? If you assign activities as a part of a sales goal, for example, when the rep completes those activities, are they automatically updated across the stack?
  8. Will it work for your entire team? Is the SPM going to be used to help everyone on your team improve? The technology should be equally as useful for star salespeople as for less successful reps. It should enhance the entire sales process for everyone. Ask yourself what you want to see your salespeople doing every day, and then figure out which technologies will help them accomplish those things.

The Bottom Line

Building a coaching stack can be challenging, and adding performance management can require some difficult decisions. You need to ensure that the platform integrates with your system of record (your CRM) and that it will maintain or increase the adoption of the system. Above all, any app you add to the coaching stack must be able to show a direct effect on revenue, including an SPM.

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Steve Jensen is the VP of Marketing at Xvoyant

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