When to Set Sales Performance Reviews

What Do We Mean By Sales Performance?

Sales is the life blood of any business, no matter smallest in the industry to the biggest giant. With out sales there exists neither any present nor any future of the company. Sales give birth to a phenomenon of Sales Performance. Sales performance can easily establish the capacity of any person associated with the field of sales, to finalise the contract with the company and meet the already given goals from the company. Sales performance is a double edged knife; it can trigger the career of the sales employee and on the same time can make him lose the job.

Important Factors For Sales Performance

Sales performance is based on countless factors and elements. Most of these make a combination of two or three factors in a set. Some of the characteristics are internal, whereas the others are external, these factors could namely be satisfaction towards the job, motivational level, ability and skills, age range, gender, time consumption and customer’s response.  In most of the organizations the role of management and managerial supervisor also play a strong factor, towards the performance of the sales personnel.

Sales Performance is Beneficial for Sales Personnel

Almost every individual works for the monetary reasons. Especially in the field of sales it’s all about gaining more and more monetary appraisal. Companies provide a good remunerations for the sales employees who out do their selves. The rewards can be in the form of many different packages; in some cases sales employees are given a fat amount, title of the employee of the month and year, increased salaries and bonuses etc.

Methods of Reviewing Sales Performance

There are particular tools and techniques for reviewing the sales performances, its’ better to be pro-active rather then to be on the re-active side of the game. One method is Informal Reviews, in which a simple dialogue usually takes place with the employees inquiring about the previous years’ experience in terms of sales with respect to the company’s standing.  The second method is known as the Journaling, in this method, a journal is maintained in which all the activities, responses and tactics are jotted down, so as to know about the employees and later they can be matched with other sales employees, to see if the things are different or similar. By this better approaches can be adopted. This really helps in developing one’s own skill set and before hand knowing the performance track. The third in the line is Peer Review, as the title itself suggests that in these techniques, peers and co-workers in sales review and judge the performance of the other sales personnel, it can at times be very beneficial and at times it’s very biased. The fourth method is the Detailed Review, it includes numeric values mostly, and apart from that what are the past sales performance trends and what were the hurdles faced, along with the preference of sales over phones or e-mails.

Important Steps for Increased Sales Performance

To extract the best performance from the employees in sales is always desired from the management. Sales Management should adopt certain steps including setting up the metrics (like, making calls to the clients, visiting them, planning a meeting time and outcome of the visit). Future can always be predicted from the past. Similarly keeping a track of earlier practices with respect to the particular metric it makes it easier to develop a game plan. By this, sales personnel are bifurcated in to different levels of top performers, middle level and below average performers. Companies and management should keep the real and achievable targets to expect a positive feed back and response from the sales employees. On the contrary, by keeping a low target also helps in achieving desirable goals set for the sales.