A powerful sales performance management tool can work wonders in improving the performance of your salesforce. In my 5 years interacting with these systems, I’ve seen implementations that range from Grimm to fairy-tale. Gathering sales data and sharing reports with your team in a coordinated platform can give you insights into their behaviors as well as drive particular behaviors. But in a flooded SPM Solution market, the story you tell with the SPM tool can be much more important than the tool you choose.
Simply exposing data tables and high-level metrics to your salesforce can sow more confusion than confidence. By crafting a more structured and targeted narrative with your SPM solution, you can drive more specific behaviors in your salesforce and reduce the amount of time they spend mired in the data.
Hansel and Gretel Aren’t the Only Ones with Breadcrumbs
What do your sales people see when they first log in to the SPM platform? Naturally, a user will attribute more weight to those metrics that are the most visible on a page. Leveraging the path that a salesperson follows through the platform, you can put the most important metrics at the beginning to emphasize their importance and simplify complex concepts.
Further, you shouldn’t inundate your users with data on the first level, but instead provide controlled data on a second level as needed. For example, a graph could compare the sales trends of all components on a first level, and then provide a sub-component level view of a specific component in a drill-down.
By utilizing simple graphs to illustrate these most important metrics, you can fill in your sales people in less time, preventing them from drowning in tides of data. When the field has to sift through seas of charts and tables, it can lead to incorrect or misleading conclusions. Instead of forcing your salesforce to make their own conclusions about their performance, show them what factors directly impacted their payout up-front.
There’s a reason your algebra teacher always made you show your work. Even the most engaged salesperson can get lost staring at a page full of numbers and charts. To avoid this, define your variables; ensure that specific achievement, modifiers or accelerators, and hurdles are clearly explained and sequenced in an intuitive way in your reports. Every time you can illustrate the specifics that lead to a payout, you can reduce the amount of time you spend answering questions and resolving perceived disputes in compensation.
Telling a Familiar Tale
Save your users time by creating and leveraging familiar visual languages. Everyone understands the difference between a green arrow and a red one at a glance: one indicates positive change and the other negative. Shaded areas in an area line graph (where the lines represent quotas and the bars, actuals) can compare sales periods with achievements greater than 100% and those with less at a glance. Above all else, don’t reinvent the wheel. Keep these codes and keys consistent across your reporting views. Use the same color to represent a KPI each time it appears and display them in the same order at every iteration.
Don’t close the book on a Sales Performance Management system when the contract is signed. Staying focused on the story you want to tell will keep your sales people on track and will lead you to your own Happily Ever After?.
For the next chapter, join sales performance experts Mark Smith, CEO & Chief Research Officer at Ventana Research, and Stephan Millard, Product Marketing Director at Optymyze, as they share the advantages and critical capabilities to consider when choosing an SPM solution on February 28, 2018 from 2-3 PM EST. Find out more here.
About the Author
Aran P. Ploshansky was a consultant at Optymyze with five years of experience delivering consulting and analytics services for industry leading clients. His areas of experience include process and system standardization, reporting design, system architecture, and strategic design.
