Sales Performance: Top Leaders’ Strategies

AI-driven automation has created a surge in sales engagement data that can help improve sales performance. But the amount of data is vast — and 60% of sales leaders say that extracting actionable insights is a major challenge. 

To pinpoint the seller activities that drive better sales enablement and sales performance improvement, standardize the way your organization uses engagement metrics.

Leverage sales role profiles to help identify the unique metrics and activities for each sales role. Make sure that metrics align with responsibilities. For example, roles can be organized into hunters (e.g., business development representative, sales development representative), farmers (e.g., account manager, customer success manager) and specialists (e.g., product specialist, sales engineer) based on their activities and metrics.

• Audit seller interactions and activities by analyzing workflows for each role. Determine how interactions can be measured and resolve data capture issues — for example, consider technology that can log interactions on the seller’s behalf for effective sales performance analysis.
• Select success and sales engagement metrics for common interactions and activities within each seller role as the baseline for sales performance trends. For example, a hunter’s success is measured by the number and quality of outreach attempts — so number of calls and contact ratio are key metrics that correlate with new clients won. 

Strategies to boost sales team performance

Sales managers begin to trust and adopt engagement metrics when they can easily connect the impact of engagement activities to sales performance. Some ways to foster this connection include the following:

• Communicating the correlations between leading and lagging sales performance metrics

• Sharing examples of incremental growth directly resulting from engagement activities

• Creating metrics dashboards that sales managers can reference in their one-on-one meetings with sellers to develop tailored coaching plans

• Reinforcing the value and importance of engagement metrics to executive decision making

Improve sales engagement data quality

Drawing a strong correlation between sales engagement and sales performance optimization requires trusted sales engagement data. The following steps will help sales operations optimize data:

• Inventory data sources and revenue technology tools that sellers use to interact with prospects and customers. 

• Prioritize data integration initiatives that improve the value of performance metrics (for example, if call volume is in CRM and seller revenue is in a financial database, calculating a key metric like revenue per call can be challenging). 

• Enhance data quality across sales engagement platforms. Focus on data latency, standardization and accuracy as the measuring points. Use these to identify data quality gaps and prioritize improvement efforts for sales engagement metric development.

Sellers often struggle to find, consume and apply training to their everyday workflow. When sales enablement leaders uncover an urgent skill or knowledge gap, they need to innovate quickly, effectively and at scale to close the gap with sellers. 

To foster timely, critical learning that sellers can use to improve sales performance, be sure your organization has the following in place:  

Role-specific training, refreshed at the start of every quarter. Arm the sales team with the critical information it needs to optimize sales performance each quarter by setting a clear expectation about their training load and responsibilities. Training should be lightweight enough to complete by midquarter to avoid conflicting with end-of-quarter sales activities, and maximize impact on sales performance and revenue goals.

Workflow-specific courses. Stakeholders in marketing, sales leadership, sales ops and product teams should collaborate to surface and prioritize the most important information sellers need to know by month three of the previous quarter for the next quarter’s training. Discussions should include the following:

• What upcoming initiatives require seller participation, and what actions do sellers need to take to boost sales team performance? 

• What major gaps in sales knowledge, skills or outcomes emerged this quarter?

• What new tools or changes to the sales process do sellers need to adopt?

• What new products or releases will launch in the next three to six months?

• Which roles should take this training?

Streamlined training. Tenured sellers spend an average of 17 hours a quarter in formal training — with an additional 12 hours spent on calls, webinars and other informal training. A predictable sales training cadence can reduce overall training time, yield higher-quality content and enable better retention for improved sales performance and productivity.

A training creation framework. Using SMEs as sales trainers expands the enablement team’s capabilities, allowing them to produce more content, faster. But because SMEs often create content in the way they think — instead of how sellers learn — they may struggle to deliver a concise message.

A training creation framework can harness SMEs’ knowledge and passion, accelerate content creation and make it easy for sellers to learn. Key elements of a training creation framework are:

• Content creation teams

• Course-planning worksheet

• Sales training templates

Buyers are 30% more likely to complete a high-quality deal when their interactions with suppliers validate the buyer’s decision and boost their confidence about the purchase. 

Sellers can affirm buyer decisions and achieve higher sales performance through mentalizing — a human-to-human process in which a seller infers a buyer’s unspoken beliefs, feelings and intentions to predict and influence buyer behavior.

Mentalizing relies on four critical seller skills:

Active listening. Sellers are present in the moment as the buyer speaks, rather than focusing on what to say next. They respond with follow-up questions and probe for missing information throughout the conversation.

Perspective taking. Sellers clearly understand the buyer’s point of view, imagining how a situation appears to the buyer and what they are thinking.

Empathizing. Sellers show emotional intelligence in anticipating how the buying journey might make buyers feel, and they adjust accordingly — especially when the adjustment can bolster confidence or ease the buyer’s fear of failure.

Cognitive decoding. Sellers synthesize all the information they’ve collected through mentalizing, use it to predict how buyers will behave, and adjust opportunity strategy to maximize the chances of closing a high-quality deal.

These skills, combined with the following essential practices, will help seller motivation and drive better sales performance:

Establish mentalizing goals. To truly impact sales performance, sellers need a clear understanding of what they need to learn from the buyer. The following questions can help with establishing the intelligence sellers need to gather: 

• How does the buying group function and where/how do they gather information?

• What are the buyer’s current buying problems, purchase goals and purchase urgency?

• What is the buyer’s individual accountability and how do they perceive risk?

• What external influences should be considered?

Sharpen mentalizing skills through training. Improved sales performance skills come with practice. In addition to focusing on what they should say or do, sellers must be able to internalize the buyer’s role and perspective through realistic scenarios and role-playing.

These exercises also provide an opportunity to address seller challenges. For example, if sellers hesitate to ask questions about the buyer’s emotional state, the trainer might focus on tactics and tools to build and demonstrate empathy.

Foster valuable buyer interactions. High-value buyer information is the fuel for higher sales performance optimization. Sellers should become proficient in the following:

• Collecting verbal and nonverbal cues, even in a virtual setting.

• Making the most of digital insights like buyer-supplied information, data on how buyers use your website, and market research.

• Fostering lasting behavior change by encouraging sellers to practice mentalization at every opportunity.