The Sales Performance wheel
The 8 Drivers of Sales Performance
- Strategy focuses on the factors that most affect the direction of the sales organization. To achieve long-term success, leaders must develop the right overall strategy, streamline it, and execute it. You can take all sorts of action, but without the right strategy and leadership, it may simply be, as Sun Tzu said, the noise before defeat.
- Structure relates to the organization of selling at the company, including sales compensation, territory design, and territory, account, and lead assignment. If you don’t get the structure right, you might not attract or keep the right people, and you leave significant revenue-growth opportunity in the market untapped.
- Operations refers to how efficiently the sales organization runs, how activities and outcomes are tracked, and how information is communicated to management for decision making. Without a good handle on operations, sales organizations are inefficient and cost too much. Leaders have no visibility into how the organization is doing or what metrics need to change to drive performance higher.
- Enablement is what allows sellers to sell at their potential, including sales management and coaching, sales process, sales method, and all technologies, tools and resources. Where lack of operations makes sales organizations inefficient, a lack of enablement ensures sales organizations are much less effective than they could be.
- Talent Management is the organization’s overall strength of people including the competencies of sellers and sales managers, recruiting, selection and assignment, and onboarding. Sales organizations need the right people in the right roles to succeed.
- Training focuses on the development of sellers as well as the organization’s culture and investment around training and education. It includes effectiveness overall and in specific areas such as filling the pipeline, driving opportunities, driving account growth, and managing sellers. Sales teams need the skills to be able to succeed. Without effective training, they don’t get them, and results suffer.
- Capabilities refers to the skills and knowledge needed to drive sales performance such as filling the pipeline, driving opportunities, developing executive relationships, consultative selling, managing sales, growing accounts, and more. Sellers need these skills to succeed, but many have significant skill deficits.
- Motivation includes seller attitudes, their energy and focus, leadership’s ability to create and sustain selling energy, and the organization’s culture with respect to selling. To optimize your sales force, you need to have a highly motivated team bringing their “A game” day in and day out.
Most relevant during:
PMF phase
GTM Fit phase
Scale phase
Most relevant for:
ACVs < $15K
ACVs $15K-$50K
ACVs > $50K
