What Is Sales Performance Management Software?

Gold, silver, and bronze. Winner, first runner-up, and honorable mention. We tend to rank our performances.

The Salesforce State of Sales report similarly classifies respondents across three tiers of sales organization performance, from high performers (36%) to moderate performers (45%) to underperformers (20%), based on year-over-year revenue.

Sales performance goes beyond looking at your sales representatives' revenue numbers.

Sales leaders must also consider factors such as quotas and forecasts to determine the value of their team's performance. That's one of the reasons why organizations increasingly use sales performance management software to help determine performance with structure and ease.

Let's dig in and see how it can benefit your sales team.

What you'll learn:

• What is sales performance management software?
• Benefits of sales performance management software
• Important features to look for in sales performance management software
• Motivate sales teams to achieve their best performance

Sales enablement software is the tools and technology that help salespeople train, give and receive coaching, and find the sales materials necessary to serve their leads. Most sales enablement apps include training through a learning management system (LMS), storing and serving sales materials through a content management system (CMS), and tracking the use of that training and content through customer relationship management (CRM) functions.

Basically, it's a lot of three-letter acronyms that lead to ROI for sales teams.

Sales performance management is a process that helps sales organizations track, manage, and improve the work of their sales teams. This includes everything from forecasting to implementing training programs, monitoring activities, quota management, and incentive planning.

The goal of an organization's sales performance management efforts is to drive revenue by improving the effectiveness and efficiency of a sales team. The process aligns sales strategy to overarching business goals and helps sales teams hit their targets.

Sales performance management software is a set of operational and analytical tools that manage and automate the processes, systems, or workflows within a sales organization. The software's features and functions might address all or part of sales operations, such as sales planning, quota management, territory management, reporting, sales training, sales enablement, sales engagement, or incentive compensation.

Sales performance management focuses on moving representatives toward company goals. Incentive management is about tracking rewards. However, incentive compensation management is a component of sales performance management.

Incentive compensation refers to the commission, bonus, or prize that a sales rep may receive on top of their base salary for achieving a certain sales goal or quota within a time period. Incentive compensation management tracks the incentives, offers oversight into an organization's compensation plan, and ensures alignment with the sales team's performance metrics with payouts.

Inadequate technology and tools is one of the top reasons sales professionals want to leave their jobs, according to the State of Sales report. Sales performance management software unites your core sales systems and data to give you connected, comprehensive, and contextual data. You can leverage the data to reveal strategic insights (big and small) to make data-driven decisions.

Here are some other ways that sales performance management software can benefit your sales team:

• Predictability and consistency: The software standardizes sales processes to enable a consistent seller experience across the team.
• Efficiency and productivity: Much of a sales rep's time is spent on tedious administrative tasks such as data entry. Representatives spend only 28% of their week actually selling. The software automates or eliminates much of a seller's admin work, so they can focus more on closing deals.
• Accuracy: Improving data accuracy is one of sales leaders' top tactics to drive growth. The software automates your team's commission calculations to eliminate errors and give you trusted data.

Before you decide on a particular software offering, consider whether it has the scalability to grow with your organization. Once you have more than 20 sales representatives, manual spreadsheets are limited and software automation is more advantageous.

Here are some essential features and functions to look for when selecting sales performance management software for your organization:

• Sales goal setting and tracking: Streamline sales planning with software that organizes your sales team's targets, quotas, and headcount. Track sellers progress in the sales-planning process and detect team members who may benefit from additional training and coaching.
• Cross-functional alignment: Connect sales data that would otherwise be siloed within a sales organization's people, teams, and processes. Gain access, visibility, and transparency for the data you need to understand your sales team's performance.
• Performance analytics and reporting: Sales performance management software comes with real-time reporting of your sales team's performance. Customizable dashboards display metrics and analytics to identify performance trends and patterns or areas for improvement.
• Territory management: Use the territory management capability to assign territories to sales representatives. The software automates your territory design to give new representatives equitable territories and ensures you have the right coverage to reach your sales quota.

A customer relationship management (CRM) system helps sales teams manage, organize, and access their customer data. By connecting sales performance management software to a CRM, you'll be able to centralize sales operations in one location and link customer data with sales planning.

Let's say you want to see how a sales representative's pipeline is tracking by how many leads they've brought in and how many sales calls they've had for a quarter. The CRM will provide this information. You can then compare it with the rep's sales quota for that quarter and assess the next steps based on performance.

Another benefit of a CRM is that it can help improve a sales rep's performance using sales AI. The AI generates insights into customer behavior, so representatives can identify new sales opportunities and draft emails backed by customer research. Tap AI to create a playlist collection of sales calls by your top performers and use that to coach underperformers on best practices and areas for improvement.

Salesforce sales performance management software is built directly into Sales Cloud so you can tie each step of a sales plan to your CRM's customer data.

Sales performance management software can give your team an edge. By using the right software to automate tasks, keep data organized, and align goals with activities, you can build a successful and high-performing sales team that drives revenue.