Build the Perfect Sales Rep Scorecard

“Sales” and “management” may be the two most popular words on LinkedIn. Between job postings, rep profiles, and numerous LinkedIn Publisher articles promising to “energize your sales team,” the sales manager seems to be the millennial of business social networking--ubiquitous and over-discussed.

Despite the promises that a great sales manager can get even the most lackluster team to quota, sales management can be a hard act to master. Although your CRM or basic sales analytics tool can tell you if reps have hit their quota, it can be difficult to see why and how to improve sales rep performance. Without this sort of actionable information, it’s hard to say that your sales force is truly data-driven.

If you have a large sales org, it can also be hard to scale your rep performance dashboards, without sacrificing detail. Sure, it would be nice to be able to see individual rep performance for each of your 150 salespeople, but how do you organize that information without sacrificing the overall view of the team’s performance for the quarter?

This is where the Sales Rep Scorecard idea comes in handy. Sure, you can build an executive dashboard to show closed-won, current pipeline, and more, but it won’t help you drill into your reps’ performance, or regional managers’ ability to enable their success. In order to do this, you’ll need to follow three main steps to build out your sales performance scorecard:

1. Choose Your Questions...and Your Battles

As with any data-driven management choice, you need to know what questions you’re asking before you dive into your sales performance. Don’t know where to get started? Consider these possible questions that a regional manager would want to ask:

• How are my sales reps performing?
• Will my reps hit their goal?
• What are our top sales people doing to win deals?

Of course, regional managers aren’t the only people in your sales org who need a full view of performance. Eventually, you’re going to need to report high-level performance to your VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officer, or other sales executives. Here are some questions executives may ask:

• How healthy is the current pipeline (qualified opportunities expected to close this quarter)?
• What are our major deals this quarter?
• How are my regional managers performing, and how does that affect rep performance?

2. Nail Down KPIs

From these questions, you can determine your key performance indicators, beyond win rate and sales pipeline. You should be sure to go over these KPIs with your entire sales org, starting with higher-level managers and executives, fellow regional managers, and eventually, the reps themselves. Transparency into the process of determining goals, KPIs, and quotas will help your reps to have some context on what their ideal quarter looks like.

As you’re determining these KPIs, don’t be afraid to correlate activities with results. For instance, although more phone calls may not CAUSE more deals to move through the later stages, if you see a correlation, that’s a good enough reason to build “number of calls” into your KPIs.

3. Visualize, Visualize, Visualize!

Now comes the fun part--building out sales dashboards that show you all of your analytics, forecasting, performance, and KPIs in one view. You can segment your sales performance dashboards to measure sales development reps, field reps, and regional managers, so your executives can see how the handoffs and management processes are working in real time. Here are a list of metrics to consider, followed by an example sales scorecard template:

Metrics to Consider

• Key Activities - The activities that you have seen correlated to closed/won deals in the past.
• Quota Attainment with Forecasting - How close to quota your rep is now, and whether their current pace will allow them to meet quota by the end of the quarter.
• Rank - How this rep is performing, compared to other reps.

But what if you want your executives to see how great the regional managers are doing? Great news--this is also possible with a sales scorecard! Although a regional manager ranking system might not make sense, since this is a smaller pool, assigning a manager score can help you to determine which territories are producing, and which need help. Manager scoring can be complex, but if you consider it like lead scoring--where reps earn points for completing certain activities, and these are aggregated by manager--that can make this easier to calculate. Here are a few other metrics you might want to put on a manager dashboard:

Metrics to Consider

• Percent to Goal - How well this territory is progressing to their goal, which can be included in the manager score.
• Key Activities per Territory - How many of the activities that correlate to closed/won this territory has participated in this quarter, which can also contribute to their score.
• Territory Performance - Tracking key activities vs. percent to goal to see if the correlation is still strong, or is decreasing over time.

Obviously, these aren’t the only metrics that could contribute sales management success, but scorecards are a way to get started with individualized, scalable sales metrics reporting. If you’d like more information on the topic, feel free to check out our live demo Friday, which will discuss sales dashboards in more detail.