{"id":8019,"date":"2009-10-06T18:40:01","date_gmt":"2009-10-06T18:40:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=8019"},"modified":"2014-10-01T18:43:54","modified_gmt":"2014-10-01T18:43:54","slug":"do-your-sales-people-make-the-grade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/?p=8019","title":{"rendered":"Do Your Sales People Make The Grade?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The topic of grading sales people came up on a recent Sales Readiness webinar we hosted when an attendee asked for benchmarking approaches beyond traditional quota attainment.\u00a0 The question deserved more detail than we could offer on a live call so we decided to treat it here.<\/p>\n

First, we’ll reference a prior post (<\/strong>The Revenue Clock is (Always) Ticking: Three Approaches to Improving Strategic Sales Planning<\/a>) which reminded sales leaders that historical success does not always guarantee future results, particularly for outsourcers in markets where a great deal of change is occurring.\u00a0 In that respect, one excellent evaluation approach which looks beyond pure financial performance is based on GE’s Vitality Curve<\/a>.\u00a0 This well documented model classifies an organization’s workforce into three categories and suggests strategies for addressing each group.\u00a0 Forgetting numbers for a moment, this model helps leaders evaluate their teams against more subjective criteria.<\/p>\n

\"GE<\/a><\/p>\n

Now looking back and numbers in the context of GE’s Vitality Curve, it’s important for sales leaders to recognize that sales execs consistently ranking in the bottom tier rarely catch fire and become top performers.\u00a0 \u00a0Yet these bottom performers are the ones leaders spend the most time supporting, defending and coaching.\u00a0 Use quarterly results as an opportunity to evaluate all sales personnel and eliminate that “bottom ten percent” that are holding back the rest of the team.<\/p>\n

Another dimension to apply to grading the sales team is including external benchmarking data.\u00a0\u00a0 While “sales” in general is not as flush with this kind of best-practice information as some other industries, there are two excellent resources worth considering for benchmarking and peer ranking data.\u00a0 In no particular order, check out the folks at both CSO Insights<\/a> and Sales Benchmark Index<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 These two organizations provide a wealth of sales industry knowledge and information for the leaders of professional selling organizations. \u00a0\u00a0Including external data is way of getting closer to understanding how effective your sales team is relative to other teams (and reps) in similar models and industries.\u00a0 This kind of data also helps evaluate other aspects of the selling process such as proposal teams, pricing organizations, lead generation and even quotas and compensation.<\/p>\n

Sales leaders, now is the time of year to make those difficult people decisions which means identifying and taking action on your own Bottom Ten Percent.\u00a0\u00a0 Remind yourself that above all sales is a performance based business.\u00a0 Someone failing to meet your requirements is letting down the entire company.\u00a0 For some this is the most difficult aspect of being a sales leader, but you could argue it is also the most important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The topic of grading sales people came up on a recent Sales Readiness webinar we hosted when an attendee asked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8019"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8019\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8022,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8019\/revisions\/8022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.matthew-j-smith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}