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Sales Performance Management: Getting Everyone on the Same Page

August 2010

Peter Ostrow

Sales Performance Management: Getting Everyone on the Same Page Page 2

© 2010 Aberdeen Group. Telephone: 617 854 5200

Executive Summary Research Benchmark

Aberdeen’s Research Benchmarks provide an in-depth and comprehensive look into process, procedure, methodologies, and technologies with best practice identification and actionable recommendations

While many companies are seeing a recovery from the economic downturn, the distribution and pace of forward progress are not necessarily being enjoyed across the board by all companies, industries or geographies. Firms are clearly seeking to capitalize on every competitive edge available to them, and the human capital of their sales team represents one of the most significant opportunities to grow revenue and market share by hitting quota more consistently. While the classic B2B sales organization may traditionally be identified with an “every man for himself” mentality among reps, and even Darwinian managerial techniques – only the fittest survive – is there perhaps a more user-friendly way to hit sales targets year after year? Are there ways to link lagging indicators (such as turnover) to leading performance metrics (such as revenue)?

Best-in-Class Performance In May and June 2010, Aberdeen surveyed 531 end-user organizations to learn about their ability to manage their sales teams effectively. Aberdeen used the following three key performance criteria to distinguish the sales teams within Best-in-Class companies:

• An average 106% current overall team attainment of quota, compared to 76% for Industry Average and 22% among Laggard companies

• 5.3% year-over-year increase in average deal size or contract value, compared to an 0.2% increase and 2.9% decrease among Industry Average and Laggard companies, respectively

• An average 3.5% year-over-year improvement of (decrease in) sales cycle – the time from sales-accepted lead to a closed deal – compared to a 2.2% decline of (increase in) sales cycles for the Industry Average and a 7.1% decline for Laggards

Competitive Maturity Assessment Survey results show that the firms enjoying Best-in-Class performance share several common characteristics, including:

• Centralized repository for sales collateral, proposals or contracts • Performance dashboards/scorecards for both sales managers and reps

Required Actions In addition to the specific recommendations in Chapter Three of this report, to achieve Best-in-Class performance, companies must:

• Measure, share and manage to defined performance metrics throughout the sales team. Beyond setting quotas, management should address team achievements, collaboration and engagement in building and sustaining sales performance.

• Drive desired behavior with incentives, compensation, and knowledge management deployments that consistently paint a clear picture of expectations – and show team members their performance against those goals in real-time.

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© 2010 Aberdeen Group. Telephone: 617 854 5200 www.aberdeen.com Fax: 617 723 7897

Table of Contents Executive Summary....................................................................................................... 2

Best-in-Class Performance..................................................................................... 2 Competitive Maturity Assessment....................................................................... 2 Required Actions...................................................................................................... 2

Chapter One: Benchmarking the Best-in-Class.................................................... 4 Issues at Hand ........................................................................................................... 4 The Maturity Class Framework............................................................................ 6 Best-in-Class Business Landscape......................................................................... 6 The Best-in-Class PACE Model ............................................................................ 7 Best-in-Class Strategies........................................................................................... 8

Chapter Two: Benchmarking Requirements for Success.................................12 Competitive Assessment......................................................................................12 Capabilities and Enablers......................................................................................14

Chapter Three: Required Actions .........................................................................23 Laggard Steps to Success......................................................................................23 Industry Average Steps to Success ....................................................................23 Best-in-Class Steps to Success ............................................................................24

Appendix A: Research Methodology.....................................................................26 Appendix B: Related Aberdeen Research............................................................28 Figures Figure 1: Business Pressures Associated with Sales Performance Management.................................................................................................................... 5 Figure 2: The Best-in-Class Demonstrate Significant Year-over-Year Success........................................................................................................................................... 7 Figure 3: Best-in-Class Strategic Actions in Response to Pressures................. 8 Figure 4: All for One, or One for All?....................................................................10 Figure 5: Compensation Best Practices by the Best-in-Class ...........................15 Figure 6: Performance Results Support Sales Compensation for Team-Wide Achievement.................................................................................................................16 Figure 7: Career Development Appears to be a Best-in-Class Priority ........19 Figure 8: Great Players Do Not Automatically Make Great Managers..........20 Figure 9: Sales Turnover Management by Best-in-Class ....................................21 Figure 10: Top Performers Realize Benefits Amid Turnover ...........................22 Tables Table 1: Top Performers Earn Best-in-Class Status.............................................. 6 Table 2: The Best-in-Class PACE Framework ....................................................... 7 Table 3: The Competitive Framework...................................................................13 Table 4: The PACE Framework Key ......................................................................27 Table 5: The Competitive Framework Key ..........................................................27 Table 6: The Relationship Between PACE and the Competitive Framework ......27



Chapter One: Benchmarking the Best-in-Class

Fast Facts

√ The average annual quota for Best-in-Class companies’ sales staff is $1.30M; Industry Average and Laggards firms’ are $1.11M and $970k

√ The average deal size or annual contract value is $388k for the Best-in-Class, and $175k for all other companies; yet 53% of the Best-in-Class were small firms (under $50M in revenue)

√ Best-in-Class firms grew their revenue per sales rep by 5.1% on a year-over-year basis. This compares with 1.6% and 4.8% reductions for the Industry Average and Laggards, respectively

The economic downturn has placed even greater pressure on the sales function, seeing its leaders tasked with increasing sales effectiveness while external forces have reduced the number of real opportunities and threatened top-line growth. Top-performing companies – those that most quickly learned to adapt to difficult conditions and emerge the strongest – understand the need for actionable practices and data that aligns sales behavior with business objectives and creates best practices that allow them to rapidly adapt to changes in the market. This requires a holistic approach that not only includes productivity enhancements for the sales function, but potentially for key partners in marketing, finance, operations, human resources, and information technology, all of whose efforts impact both top and bottom line growth.

February 2010Aberdeen research conducted for the Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling report found that companies adopting Sales Performance Management (SPM) solutions out-performed non-users across a number of key metrics:

• 57% vs. 38% current team attainment of quota

• 51% vs. 33% of reps achieving quota

• 30% vs. 20% win-loss rate

• 1% year-over-year increase in revenue, vs. a 4% decrease

Moreover, 66% of these Best-in-Class firms – those with the best performance in quota attainment and reduction of both sales cycles and non-selling time – currently deploy incentive or SPM technologies, compared to 57% of Industry Average and 50% of Laggard companies. The current research will investigate whether SPM solutions – and the best practice processes and organizational efforts supporting them – are helping these top-performing companies maximize the output of their sales team by using compensation management, consulting, incentives, location intelligence, SPM software/technologies and training solutions to empower their selling professionals with the skills and knowledge required to achieve peak performance.

Sector Definition

For the purposes of this survey, the term “sales performance management” refers to any process, strategy or initiative focused on hiring, training, managing or promoting sales staff, in order to achieve optimal performance in revenue attainment and overall sales productivity.

Issues at Hand Given these trends, valuable insight can be gained from understanding how top performing sales organizations address the following issues:

• Sales turnover. Should it be reduced at all costs, or is there an acceptable/desirable outflow of low-performing reps? How much does it actually cost to replace a high/medium/bottom performer, and how long does it take?


http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/6332-RA-sales-force-intelligence-automation.asp

http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/6332-RA-sales-force-intelligence-automation.asp



• Teamwork. Does an “every man for himself” environment trump “all for one, and one for all,” or are communal achievements a lagging indicator of long-term corporate success?

• Career path. While HR executives traditionally emphasize organizational development, does a promotional track matter to the sales team? Do great players make great managers? Do more highly engaged employees produce more for the company?

Figure 1: Business Pressures Associated with Sales Performance Management

"Look carefully at the productivity, or lack of it, of the current interface to the sales performance management systems. Bad interfaces lead to sales not wanting to use the system, and result in inaccurate data entry."

~ Peter Sedgewick, Director of UK and Northern Europe,

Primeur

66%

34%28%

24%

14%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

We’re notseeing

sufficientgrowth in

top-linerevenue

We don’tconvert

enough leadsto sales

Our salescycle is too

long

Our salesforecasts arenot accurate

enough

We need toimprove

customerretention

n = 531

Perc

enta

ge o

f Res

pond

ents

66%

34%28%

24%

14%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

We’re notseeing

sufficientgrowth in

top-linerevenue

We don’tconvert

enough leadsto sales

Our salescycle is too

long

Our salesforecasts arenot accurate

enough

We need toimprove

customerretention

n = 531

Perc

enta

ge o

f Res

pond

ents

Source: Aberdeen Group, August 2010

Looking at the key business pressures cited by survey respondents in the context of sales performance management (Figure 1), the relevance of these issues is clear. Companies that may have endeavored to shrink their bottom-line expenses, through difficult or even draconian staff and resource cuts during the recession, are now faced with only one option for increasing their thinned-out margins: growing top-line revenue, which can only be accomplished through sales to net-new or existing customers. Hence the predominant concern around insufficient growth in the top line, which is carried out exclusively by the sales staff. If excessive turnover or lack of management development within this team has the potential to derail quota attainment, the worries associated with this business pressure are well-founded.

In addition to an enhanced discussion to follow, regarding sales turnover and team-building, the potential for top-performing teams to improve their lead-to-win ratios, shrink their sales cycles and improve forecasting accuracy are represented by the capabilities and enablers detailed in Chapter Two.




The Maturity Class Framework Aberdeen used three key performance criteria among responding sales organizations around sales forecasting, to distinguish the Best-in-Class from Industry Average and Laggard organizations:

• Current overall team attainment of sales quota

• Year-over-year change in average deal size or contract value

• Year-over-year change in average sales cycle or time-to-close

Table 1: Top Performers Earn Best-in-Class Status

Definition of Maturity Class

Mean Class Performance

Best-in-Class: Top 20%

of aggregate performance

scorers

106% average current overall team attainment of quota 5.3% average year-over-year increase in average deal size or contract value; 49% showed improvement 3.5% average year-over-year improvement of (decrease in) sales cycle – time from sales-accepted lead to closed deal; 32% showed improvement

Industry Average: Middle 50% of aggregate performance

scorers

76% average current overall team attainment of quota


0.2% average year-over-year decrease in average deal size or contract value; 21% showed improvement 2.2% average year-over-year worsening of (increase in) sales cycle – time from sales-accepted lead to closed deal; 15% showed improvement

Laggard: Bottom 30% of aggregate performance

scorers

22% average current overall team attainment of quota

"We evaluate our sales performance management program annually to ensure alignment with the changing, dynamic business climate we face."

~ Elizabeth Edwards, Director of Human Resources, Benjamin

Moore

2.9% average year-over-year decrease in average deal size or contract value; 16% showed improvement 7.1% average year-over-year worsening of (increase in) sales cycle – time from sales-accepted lead to closed deal; 3% showed improvement


With an understanding of the results associated with Best-in-Class sales organizations, it is worth examining how these companies reach these advanced levels of achievement.

Best-in-Class Business Landscape A filtering question used in Aberdeen's research for this study was: "does your organization have a process to appraise, evaluate and/or manage the performance of your sales employees?" Fully 90% of the Best-in-Class companies as defined by the metrics in Table 1indicated that they do, whereas only 67% of Industry Average and Laggard organizations indicated the same. This delta begins to explain why the year-over-year performance results of the three maturity classes, as represented by Figure 2, is so significant. Companies that deploy sales teams without an eye toward understanding how they perform and, more importantly, how to improve



their results over time, demonstrate a short-sighted view of potential business success, and their annual metrics suffer accordingly. Fortunately, almost all the Industry Average and Laggard companies that don't appraise, evaluate or manage their sales teams indicate that they plan to do so in the near future: 31%, bringing the current/planned total to 98%; all the remaining 10% of Best-in-Class companies also plan to implement SPM initiatives.

Figure 2: The Best-in-Class Demonstrate Significant Year-over-Year Success

-6.6%

-3.8% -4.2%

-6.8%

-4.3%

5.7%4.8%

4.2%

2.5% 2.3%

-1.1%-1.7%

-0.1%

-1.8%

0.8%

-8.0%

-6.0%

-4.0%

-2.0%

0.0%

2.0%

4.0%

6.0%

Teamattainment

of quota

Time toproductivity

Leadconversion

rate

Repsachieving

quota

Salesturnover

n = 531

YOY

chan

ge

Best-in-Class Industry Average Laggard

-6.6%

-3.8% -4.2%

-6.8%

-4.3%

5.7%4.8%

4.2%

2.5% 2.3%

-1.1%-1.7%

-0.1%

-1.8%

0.8%

-8.0%

-6.0%

-4.0%

-2.0%

0.0%

2.0%

4.0%

6.0%

Teamattainment

of quota

Time toproductivity

Leadconversion

rate

Repsachieving

quota

Salesturnover

n = 531

YOY

chan

ge



The Best-in-Class PACE Model Using sales performance management best practices and technologies to achieve corporate goals requires a combination of strategic actions, organizational capabilities, and enabling technologies and services that can be summarized as shown in Table 2.

Table 2: The Best-in-Class PACE Framework

Pressures Actions Capabilities Enablers We’re not seeing sufficient growth in top-line revenue

Understand and replicate characteristics of top-performing sales people in our organization

A structured process via which sales managers communicate with their reps to provide feedback on their performance

Technology: Performance dashboards/scorecards for both sales managers and reps Synchronous web-conferencing technology (i.e. webinars) for online product demos or live online training




Pressures Actions Capabilities Enablers Drive repeatable behavior among sales reps Focus on getting new sales reps productive more quickly

A process for reps to share 'sales tips' or other best practices with colleagues Dedicated channel management resources Defined metrics to analyze the impact of sales performance on overall company health Performance analytics against agreed-to objectives (metrics) are reviewed regularly

CRM or SFA that includes a compensation module Automated solutions to forecast rep performance against goal/expected compensation Survey tool to measure sales employee engagement Learning management system module specifically oriented to the sales team

Service: Sales performance management consulting from external providers Sales training services/content from external providers


Best-in-Class Strategies The most popular strategies among Best-in-Class organizations to improve sales effectiveness in the context of sales performance management (Figure 3) follow a number of themes, though two stand out: scalability and time management.

Figure 3: Best-in-Class Strategic Actions in Response to Pressures

44%

37%

30%

24% 22%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Understandand replicate

characteristicsof top-

performingsales people

Driverepeatable

behavioramong sales

reps

Adoptprograms to

improve salesmanagement’sability to buildand developsales teams

Focus ongetting newsales repsproductive

more quickly

Minimize non-selling time forour sales force

Best-in-Class, n = 531

Perc

enta

ge o

f Res

pond

ents 44%

37%

30%

24% 22%

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

Understandand replicate

characteristicsof top-

performingsales people

Driverepeatable

behavioramong sales

reps

Adoptprograms to

improve salesmanagement’sability to buildand developsales teams

Focus ongetting newsales repsproductive

more quickly

Minimize non-selling time forour sales force

Best-in-Class, n = 531

Perc

enta

ge o

f Res

pond

ents


The two most popular strategic actions that Best-in-Class companies consider regarding the key pressure of improving top-line revenue growth are focused on creating repeatable, desirable selling behavior within their team. Current Aberdeen research for Sales Training: Deploying Knowledge,




Process and Technology to Consistently Hit Quota (publishing September 2010) shows that 35% of top-performing sales teams consider sales training "absolutely vital to the health of our company, regardless of cost," compared to 25% of other firms. These top-performers understand the value of training their sales team via consistent deployment of successful messaging and tactics; they also provide post-training reinforcement of the content at a 54% rate, compared to only 28% of Laggards. The "driving repeatable behaviors" strategy among strong performers can be further captured and standardized by using assessment/measurement tools to understand pre- and post-training sales rep performance metrics; these approaches are on average used by 51% of Best-in-Class companies, versus 33% of Industry Average and 15% of Laggards.

Duplicating the skill sets and characteristics of these individuals is supported by strategic SPM actions around getting new sales hires up and running quickly, and then ensuring they are efficient once trained. Indeed, the Best-in-Class within this research report an average annual improvement in (shortening of) time-to-productivity of 4.8%, compared to 1.7% and 3.8% increases (lengthening of) for Industry Average and Laggard firms. Minimizing reps' non-selling time, finally is supported by a 56% Best-in-Class adoption of sales intelligence technologies (third-party information pertaining to account/industries), versus 40% and 36% for Industry Average and Laggard companies, which is supported by Aberdeen research in Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling (February 2010).

"You have to model the behavior you want to see in the sales team, throughout the management ranks."

~ Linda Julian, Managing Partner, Julian Midwinter &

Associates P/L

Finally, a significant number of best practices supported by Aberdeen's Human Capital Management (HCM) research, specifically Effective Talent Management Drives Profitable Business Growth (July 2010) and Beyond Satisfaction: Engaging Employees to Retain Customers (July 2009) speak to the value of targeted recruiting and training/development efforts once onboard. The former of the two HCM research papers includes two abbreviated case studies of sales organizations that achieved stellar sales improvement as the result of better hiring and onboarding practices. In one example, IKON Office Solutions (now Ricoh Americas) achieved a $10 million increase in sales from 100 fewer new-hire sales reps than the previous year. And in the other example, a Fortune 20 company was able to increase its sales from 1,000 newly-hired sales reps by 17% in their first six months with the company, as compared to 1,000 sales reps hired the previous year. This 17% gain equated to an additional $600 million in sales in that six-month period. In the sales performance management arena, these same lessons can apply as well.


http://www.aberdeen.com/Aberdeen-Library/6332/RA-sales-force-intelligence-automation.aspx


http://www.aberdeen.com/Aberdeen-Library/6762/AI-talent-workforce-management.aspx


http://www.aberdeen.com/Aberdeen-Library/6050/RA-employee-customer-retention.aspx




Aberdeen Insights — Does Teamwork Matter?

Sales professionals and even their managers are classically viewed as focused only on "WIIFM" – "what's in it for me?" – rather than projecting a team-oriented spirit. When commission payments, override bonuses and President's Club trips are at stake, why shouldn't self-interest trump the greater good? Yet Best-in-Class companies are 20% more likely than all other organizations to indicate that teamwork does, in fact, matter to achieving optimal business results.

As Figure 4 illustrates, these firms achieve optimal sales effectiveness, in part, through compensation plans that support overall group or company achievements in addition to individualized commission plans. They also encourage collaboration with social media technologies rooted in the give-a-penny, take-a-penny egalitarianism of sharing best practices within the sales team.

Figure 4: All for One, or One for All?

38%

51% 50%

46%

42%39%

30%

35%

40%

45%

50%

55%

60%

Sales reps’ compensationincludes components that reflect

BOTH individual and groupperformance against specific

goals

Internal sales collaboration tools(i.e., wiki pages, discussion

forums, social media platform)

n = 531

Perc

enta

ge o

f Res

pond

ents

Best-in-Class


Industry Average Laggard

38%

51% 50%

46%

42%39%

30%

35%

40%

45%

50%

55%

60%

Sales reps’ compensationincludes components that reflect

BOTH individual and groupperformance against specific

goals

Internal sales collaboration tools(i.e., wiki pages, discussion

forums, social media platform)

n = 531

Perc

enta

ge o

f Res

pond

ents



Moreover, 71% of top performers provide organization-wide financial rewards for achieving certain goals, beyond the commissions or incentives paid to sales team members. Only 53% of other companies reward, or benefit from, this clear validation of promoting team efforts, incentives, accomplishments and rewards.



Case Study — McKesson Provider Technologies

Consider the case of McKesson Provider Technologies, an information solutions provider within the Fortune 15 McKesson Corporation that serves the physician and hospital marketplace. According to Mike Jackson, Director of Sales Incentive Planning and Management, an on-premise legacy sales compensation solution was in place but was being end-of-lifed by the provider. From a technology perspective, Jackson says, “This tool had grown antiquated and error-prone, requiring an inordinate amount of processing time and IT intervention.” What’s more, the staff had grown to 750 sales professionals, and the lack of automation around such needs as compensation inquiry resolution had grown burdensome. McKesson chose a contemporary, SaaS-based solution within an RFI process that, “instantaneously began making a huge difference in our ability to serve the McKesson sales force with a streamlined workflow process, better communications, single sign-on functionality,” and more, he reports. “Sales reps no longer directly call the compensation analysts on the phone,” which previously had forced the compensation group to filter out subjective opinions manually, but now, “we can diagnose all the inquiry data from reps and managers fairly, to make better, faster determinations both for issue resolution, and also for better sales plan design.” Jackson also uses the new incentive management solution to measure performance metrics and staff evaluations for his own group of analysts.


In addition to more efficient resource deployment within McKesson’s incentive management team, Jackson explains that, “our internal customer satisfaction is at an all time high.” He regularly surveys the sales organization, which, “previously had given the compensation process such low marks that we could directly attribute expensive sales rep turnover to significant levels of frustration… and now we’re singing our praises right from the start of using the new solution.” One of the best accolades his team received was from a top sales performer, who admitted that much to his own surprise, he was no longer “shadow accounting” his incentive compensation because the new system was so accurate and reliable – and provided him more time to focus on making quota.

“Now we can diagnose all the inquiry data from reps and managers fairly, to make better, faster determinations both for issue resolution, and also for better sales plan design.”

~ Mike Jackson, Director of Sales Incentive Planning and

Management, McKesson Provider Technologies

In the next chapter, we will see what the top performers are doing to achieve these gains.



Chapter Two: Benchmarking Requirements for Success

Fast Facts

√ The average lead conversion rate among all respondents (sales-accepted lead results in a closed deal) is 20%

√ The average sales cycle among all survey respondents is 4.4 months

√ Sales Performance Management budgets are scheduled to increase over the next year by an average of 6.3%

Effective sales performance management plays a critical role in an organization's ability to turn these strategies into profit. The following is an analysis of how top performers distinguish themselves from other companies through the implementation of capabilities and enablers that support excellence in deploying sales forecasting best practices.

Case Study — ArcSight

Consider the case of ArcSight, a provider of security and compliance management solutions that intelligently identify and mitigate cyber threat and risk for businesses and government agencies. According to Cathy Martin, Director of Field Operations, who supports software sales operations for 150 reps, the company’s compensation processes were difficult until 2008. “We had one commission analyst, paying everyone on spreadsheets; it was just a mess,” she explains. “Keeping track of all the payment calculations, multiple people deserving credit for team selling, was very challenging. It really lent itself to a lot of human error, just even with basic commission rates.” Martin herself grew increasingly bombarded with issues from both sales and finance staff, and spent inordinate amounts of time “simply trying to understand right vs. wrong” within an overload of sales payment data. In 2008 ArcSight invested in an incentive compensation management system that was easily integrated in their SaaS CRM deployment and, says Martin, “immediately able to automate almost our entire process.” ArcSight hired a third-party consultant to write all the existing compensation plans into the system, and has continued leveraging their assistance with updated implementations since that time. The results, says Martin, have been very successful. “Since we’ve implemented it, I’ve hardly had any of the old conversations about errors or exceptions. We know the calculations and percentages are correct, and can adapt to changes very easily while tracking all the history. The reps and SE’s are spending a lot less time worrying whether their commission calculations are correct. They have faith in the system, don’t do shadow accounting, and can see any information any time, on demand.” An added benefit for ArcSight is that non-sales colleagues are taking advantage of the system as well. The finance group, for example, is able to calculate and close each business reporting cycle more quickly, since compensation issues don’t linger as long, which helps the company as a whole with overall financial closing windows. “The whole process is a lot easier, despite the fact we’ve grown 30% to 40% in each of the last two years,” Martin says; “I can’t imagine supporting today’s sales force with spreadsheets.”

Competitive Assessment Aberdeen Group analyzed the aggregated metrics of surveyed companies to determine whether their performance ranked as Best-in-Class, Industry




Average, or Laggard. In addition to having common performance levels, each class also shared characteristics in five key categories: (1) process (the approaches they take to execute daily operations); (2) organization (corporate focus and collaboration among stakeholders); (3) knowledge management (contextualizing data and exposing it to key stakeholders); (4) technology (the selection of the appropriate tools and the effective deployment of those tools); and (5) performance management (the ability of the organization to measure its results to improve its business). These characteristics (identified in Table 3) serve as a guideline for best practices, and correlate directly with Best-in-Class performance across the key metrics.

Table 3: The Competitive Framework

Best-in-Class Average Laggards A structured process via which sales managers communicate

with their reps to provide feedback on their performance 79% 71% 61%

A process for reps to share 'sales tips' or other best practices with colleagues

Process

62% 55% 42% Dedicated channel management resources Organization 44% 42% 22%

Centralized repository for sales collateral, proposals or contracts Knowledge 76% 65% 64%

Enabling Technology/

Service

69% Performance dashboards / scorecards for both sales managers and reps 67% Synch-ronous web-conferencing technology for online product demos or live online training 51% Automated solutions to forecast rep performance against goal / expected compensation 49% CRM or SFA that includes a compensation module 47% Sales training services/content from external providers





Best-in-Class Average Laggards Defined metrics to analyze the impact of sales performance

on overall company health 74% 57% 46%

Performance analytics against agreed-to objectives (metrics) are reviewed regularly

Performance


67% 63% 49%


Capabilities and Enablers Based on the findings of the Competitive Framework and interviews with end users, the Best-in-Class demonstrate that a highly identifiable set of corporate capabilities and enablers can lead to measurable business success through the deployment of specific sales-oriented methodologies and technologies. Additional Aberdeen research is cited to further support these positive trends.

Process While it might be surprising in the contemporary business workplace to note an employee-manager relationship in which no process exists to communicate about the staff member's performance, nearly two-fifths of Laggard sales organizations fail to do so. This may in part be due to a sort of myth around sales teams: since the ability to measure performance is so transparent – was the quota met or not? – perhaps it is deemed less vital for managers to formally provide feedback, suggestions for improvement or plans for personal development to their sales representatives. In fact, 79% of Best-in-Class companies currently deploy this process capability, and an additional 18% indicate a plan to do so in the near future. Indeed, in Employee Performance Management: The Alpha and the Omega of Talent Strategy and Business Execution (May 2010), Aberdeen research shows that 83% of top performing organizations provide regular, informal feedback sessions that include monitoring progress toward defined goals, compared to 60% of Laggards. This regular feedback is essential not only for managers and their direct reports to discuss and monitor progress against goals, but also to identify, reinforce, and/or adjust behaviors that either impede or promote that person's ability to achieve their objectives.

“The reps and SE’s are spending a lot less time worrying whether their commission calculations are correct. They have faith in the system, don’t do shadow accounting, and can see any information any time, on demand.”

~ Cathy Martin, Director of Field Operations, ArcSight

Beyond manager-employee feedback, sales reps can also grow their skills via the ability learn about and share best practices or tips around essential skills such as prospecting, positioning, nurturing, and closing. Laggard organizations are 48% less likely to support their teams with collaborative collection and sharing of "tribal knowledge," a key process capability exhibited by 66% more top-performing companies than bottom-performing companies (57% vs. 35%) in Aberdeen's Sales Training: Translating Tribal Selling Knowledge Into Bottom-Line Productivity research (September 2009). As indicated earlier, teamwork does indeed matter, and sales organizations best equipped to hit their numbers – the Best-in-Class average 106% of team attainment of quota – are wise to promote it with appropriate technology tools and institutionalized processes to leverage internal knowledge.

http://www.aberdeen.com/aberdeen-library/6361/RA-employee-performance-management.aspx





Organization Twice as many Best-in-Class sales organizations deploy dedicated channel management resources when compared to Laggards, and 44% of top performers include channel partners in their sales compensation plans, versus 26% of other companies. In Channel Sales: Renaissance in Partner Management (August 2008) the top performers, who achieved the best annual revenue growth and increases in average order size, overwhelmingly supported the assignment of individual(s) with ownership / management of strategy for all partner relationships, as well as linking manufacturer sales staff with channel sales reps, by an average of 59% more frequency than Laggards. Sales performance management best practices are thus not limited to internal reps, and can include supporting indirect sellers working for channel partners, system integrators, value-added resellers, etc.

Another key ingredient to organizational effectiveness regarding sales performance management is compensation, which as Figure 5 indicates is best handled through careful attention paid to both the structure and content regarding rewarding sales professionals for their efforts. While a dedicated Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) resource managing sales compensation might seem a luxury, it should be noted that 53% of the Best-in-Class report annual revenues of under $50 million, and 61% employ fewer than 250 staff overall. These organizations, however, understand that the careful attention required for adequately supporting sales teams through their compensations is worth the investment. Indeed, 81% of all companies in this research report provide varying types of financial rewards to different types of sales teams, i.e. inside, outside, major accounts, etc. And, the Best-in-Class are 33% more likely than other companies (36% vs. 27%) to pay attention to the automation of sales compensation exceptions, such as commission splits, overrides, quota/account changes and spiff programs. These are further testaments to the complexities involved in sales compensation.

Figure 5: Compensation Best Practices by the Best-in-Class

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"We balance cash commissions between month-to-date and year-to-date performance targets, and also monitor and commission reps according to strict best practices in their pipeline management to ensure all opportunities are handled effectively."

~ David Masters, Director of Business Development, Clark &

Associates

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As we have seen above in the context of valuing teamwork in the traditional dog-eat-dog sales environment, providing some kind of incentive to sellers for achievements that involve others' performance is a positive attribute of the most successful companies. Breaking out the performance of all companies that adopt this capability in the context of sales compensation, and comparing it with the metrics of companies that don't, yields the results seen in Figure 6. Both individual achievement rates for reps themselves, as well as team performance and important customer retention statistics, all show better results from those organizations committed to promoting a sense of teamwork throughout the enterprise, via their sales compensation best practices.

Figure 6: Performance Results Support Sales Compensation for Team-Wide Achievement

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Knowledge Management In Optimizing Lead-To-Win: Shrinking the Sales Cycle and Focusing Closers on Sealing More Deals (May 2010), 74% of top-performing companies – defined as those with the best results around lead conversion, proposal generation and sales cycle reduction – reported a year-over-year increase in the volume of proposals and RFP responses sent out per month, per sales rep, compared to 28% and 1% for Industry Average and Laggard firms. The actual year-over-year change, moreover, was 9.1% for the top performers, versus decreases of 0.4% and 6.8% for the other maturity classes, respectively. The capabilities and enablers behind these performance gaps focus on how the strongest sales organizations streamline the bottom portion of the traditional sales funnel, using a variety of technologies such as


http://www.aberdeen.com/Aberdeen-Library/6449/RA-sales-cycle-effectiveness.aspx




contract management, proposal automation and electronic signature capture to speed up the deal-closing process. Similarly the SPM Best-in-Class are 19% more likely than Laggards to build a centralized repository for the kind of content that marketing, sales and even service teams can leverage to more efficiently find and use the most effective messaging tools in support of hitting their quota numbers.

An even bigger gap exists between top performers and other companies regarding the knowledge management capability of sales reps using automated solutions to forecast their performance against goal and, and to determine their likely compensation associated with eventual numbers reached. Fifty-one percent (51%) of Best-in-Class sales forces adopt this approach, compared to 30% of Industry Average and 21% of Laggards. Providing sales reps with forecasting tools is a way to encourage self-assessment, self-awareness and contributor-level motivation among sales teams that too often are simply presented with performance goals and statistics from above; the Best-in-Class are more adept at supporting bottom-up enablers in addition to top-down views of the business at large.

Technology A wide variety of sales performance management technology enablers show up more frequently in Best-in-Class deployments than among other organizations:

• Providing performance dashboards or scorecards for both individual contributors and sales managers allows all team members to answer the basic question, in real-time, "how am I doing?" Because sales as a profession is innately competitive, it is reasonable to expect some degree of motivation to occur when reps compare their achievements to those of their peers, or managers to other selling teams. While the value of teamwork has been established as a positive corporate attribute, above, nevertheless some degree of intramural competition enabled by easily accessible data is appropriate and linked to Best-in-Class performance results.

"It is important to replace good salespeople with other good salespeople, and not expect the team to carry the bag for lost headcount.”

~ Roy Garcia, Director, Commercial Accounts and Alliances, Oildex/Transzap

• 81% of top-performing companies deploy synchronous web conferencing or virtual classroom training, as opposed to 64% of all other organizations, for the pending Aberdeen research study for Sales Training: Deploying Knowledge, Process and Technology to Consistently Hit Quota (publishing September 2010). In the context of optimizing the performance of any selling organization, this contemporary spin on traditional, instructor-led sales training provides efficiencies and travel expense savings without sacrificing the personal elements of successful instruction.

• In The Carrot or the Stick? Competing Strategies for Sales Effectiveness (July, 2009), Aberdeen found that top-performing companies not only exhibited higher rates of CRM adoption, but also motivated use of the technology among sales reps with add-on functionalities such as forecasting tools, click-to-call telecommunications links and sales


http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/perspective/6173-AI-sales-effectiveness-force-crm.asp



intelligence feeds. CRM compensation modules that allow sellers to instantly compute their commissions, bonuses and incentives are a smart way to keep the activities, account plans, opportunities, collateral and other CRM-hosted items inextricably linked to the eventual payments earned by sales reps who optimize their use of the core CRM technology.

• Early findings for Sales Training: Deploying Knowledge, Process and Technology to Consistently Hit Quota (publishing September 2010) show that users of sales training services or content from external providers average a 62% overall team attainment of annual quota (Best-in-Class companies average 93%), while non-users only hit 44% of their number. The SPM Best-in-Class adopt providing sales team members and their managers with selling skills ranging from prospecting and presenting, to negotiation, deal-closing and account management more than twice as frequently as Laggards. Top performers also recognize that successful sales training is not represented by a single event, but by ongoing reinforcement and refreshing of content.

In addition to these technology enablers, a number of other sales technologies adopted by at least half of Best-in-Class companies are represented in Table 3. Budgeting for all these solutions is not necessary for success in sales performance; focused Aberdeen research covering each of these topics is available at www.aberdeen.com. Still, lest it appear that only large organizations can afford to support big sales forces with these enablers, it should be noted that 53% of the SPM Best-in-Class report annual revenues of under $50 million; best practices are size-agnostic.

Performance Management The highlighted performance management capabilities from Table 3 illustrate the vital need to measure sales team performance, in two different contexts. First, top performing organizations formally bring sales reps and their leaders together regularly to ascertain progress against goals, in order to provide managerial feedback, coaching, corrective action and support as needed. These discussions need not solely focus on sales quota, however: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as activities conducted (phone dials/connect, appointments held, proposals sent), training events attended, CRM data provided, etc. are all potentially key elements worth measuring and analyzing in the context of evaluating, and improving, sales rep performance.

Secondly, Best-in-Class firms are 61% more likely than Laggards to link the sales team's overall performance to the company's overall health, using defined metrics such as forecasting accuracy, customer retention, net client value, etc. Rather than isolating the perception of the sales team's performance around the simple number of dollars in closed deals, these companies value a more holistic contribution by the business development team, and track measurable statistics to back up their commitment.

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The Lesson of Ted Williams One of the best baseball players in history, Ted Williams was notoriously unsuccessful as a manager once his on-field heroics had run their course. While his rocky relationships with teammates and especially the media during his playing days should have provided clues to a temperament equally ill-suited to leadership, the general assumption was that his batting skills alone would yield powerful results for any team he managed. In the end, his 273-364 record was mediocre at best, and the concept of "a great player makes a great manager" was quickly put to rest.

Figure 7: Career Development Appears to be a Best-in-Class Priority

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"With SPM, you always need to consider its integration capabilities to the CRM and other systems like HR and Finance, to effectively track key metrics you can objectively evaluate.”

~ Balaji Nagarajan, Sr. Manager Marketing Services, Congruent

Solutions

In professional sales environments, the same assumption has traditionally held true, with top performers often promoted into managerial roles with the hope that their abilities and accomplishments would rub off on new and more junior staff members. Indeed, the current research shows (Figure 7) that the Best-in-Class are inclined toward pursuing this approach, with career paths, professional development and sales training offered more consistently than by other companies with weaker performance results. Yet a closer look at the performance management enablers shows relatively weak support for additional methodologies associated with the classic rep-to-manager sales career trajectory. As Figure 8 details, none of the additional business competencies earns even a one-third popularity rating from the Best-in-Class. Moreover, the assumption that sales reps should automatically populate sales management ranks through established career paths is enacted by Laggards 48% more often than by better-performing




firms. Additionally, a skills-identification approach is similarly more popular among the poorer-performing sales teams.

Figure 8: Great Players Do Not Automatically Make Great Managers

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The lesson here may not be simply that the best sales reps do not make the best managers. Rather, the more popular Best-in-Class performance management capabilities – metrics, coaching and even "regular review of compensation strategies to ensure alignment with the changing needs of the overall organization," with 51% Best-in-Class adoption versus 42% for Laggards – are worth the focus of companies seeking to maximize the potential of each player on the team.

Aberdeen Insights — Sales Turnover

In the days of Jack Welch's leadership, General Electric was well-known for their "20-70-10" human resources practice, in which annual employee evaluations earned the top 20% of performers a path to management, and the bottom 10% a pink slip or re-assignment. Does the theory apply to professional sales teams, that the involuntary separation of some portion of your team on a regularly basis is a healthy exercise?

continued





Aberdeen asked survey respondents to define the ideal turnover rate, and the resulting 9.5% average was eerily close to the GE paradigm. Yet the actual sales turnover averaged 20.6% across the board, more than twice the supposedly perfect level. Consider the actual costs of this differential based on the SPM research results:

• 38% of new sales reps achieve their adjusted first-year quota, vs. 45% of sales reps overall

• The average estimated cost of replacing a sales rep was $30,420

• The average time-to-hire (1.78 months) plus time-to-productivity (3.6 months) means almost a half-year of effort to replace a producing sales rep

The first of these points speaks to the potential productivity losses suffered by companies with double the ideal turnover rates: if new reps are 18% less effective, and a company employs twice as many of them as they should, how can they mitigate the damage? Figure 9 combines process, performance data and technology adoption to indicate how Best-in-Class companies are attempting to minimize these efficiency losses.

Figure 9: Sales Turnover Management by Best-in-Class

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continued





While the top-performing firms report only slightly better current turnover rates (19.3% vs. 21.5% for all others), their advantage in year-over-year changes around turnover issues are more clear, as illustrated in Figure 10, and speak to the long-term benefits of robust on-boarding and CRM adoption.

Figure 10: Top Performers Realize Benefits Amid Turnover

Best-in-ClassBest-in-Class Industry AverageIndustry Average LaggardLaggard

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Chapter Three: Required Actions

Fast Facts

Best-in-Class companies show the following average year-over-year trends:

√ 5.7% increase in overall team attainment of quota, vs. a 6.6% decrease for Laggards

√ 4.8% reduction in sales rep time-to-productivity, vs. a 3.8% increase for Laggards

√ 2.5% increase in the percentage of sales reps achieving quota, vs. a 6.8% decrease for Laggards

Whether a company is trying to move its performance in sales performance management from Laggard to Industry Average, or Industry Average to Best-in-Class, the following actions will help spur the necessary performance improvements:

Laggard Steps to Success • Adopt performance dashboards/scorecards for both sales

managers and reps. This is a natural first step for Laggards seeking to improve their overall sales performance – they currently trail Industry Average firms by 42% in deploying them – as they begin to measure, track and manage to the accomplishments of the sales team members in an analytical, unbiased fashion. Not only will sales reps appreciate an honest, real-time ability to gauge their own performance, but managers too should be empowered to understand if their team is tracking under or over plan.

• Formalize and dedicate channel management resources to third-party sellers, if your sales model includes VAR's, distribution partners, franchisees or other quota carriers not on your own payroll. With many companies relying on the channel for a majority or even the entirety of their revenue, the Laggards among them are missing out on revenue growth opportunities by failing to build this organizational capability into their business plan as do other companies twice as often. This is especially vital advice if third-party sellers of your product or service are not exclusively dedicated to representing your company and have the opportunity to sell others' wares; the attention paid to their compensation by your channel management resource will help prioritize your solution in their attention span.

• Support a process for reps to share best practices. We've seen in this study that teamwork matters, in that formalized collaboration and compensation methodologies take a productive edge off the classically selfish behavior associated with sales professionals. With minimal investment, Laggards can make progress toward the shorter sales cycles and increase deal sizes enjoyed by Industry Average and Best-in-Class companies by encouraging the development and accessibility of sales "tribal knowledge."

Industry Average Steps to Success • Connect sales performance to the company's overall health

through data and communication best practices. Much as the Best-in-Class firms in this study are defined by enterprise-relevant metrics – revenue, sales cycle, and deal size – so should sales managers take care to measure their own team's performance by




the statistics that matter to the entire organization and any related external stakeholders. With the deployment of contemporary pipeline management tools, too, the sales team can shed the traditional view of a self-serving, inaccurate forecasting process and become a trusted partner in sound financial planning and enterprise-wide development efforts. Once again, teamwork matters, as illustrated by the 30% adoption delta between Industry Average and Best-in-Class sales organizations.

• Deploy automated solutions to forecast goal and compensation performance. Nothing will derail the effectiveness of a sales team member faster than their feeling confused or under-served by the compensation and quota numbers by which they naturally live and breathe. Companies that make the basic answer to the "how will my performance be viewed?" question available in real-time, with 100% accuracy, achieve better results than Industry Average firms and are 70% more likely to formalize the acquisition and publication of such data. These organizations value the extra motivation this capability this affords sales team members who can easily see their way to bonuses, spiffs and President's Club rewards.

• Capture coaching or training content and make it available to reps for future relevant selling scenarios. A key element in building and sustaining sales success lies in training, whether the lessons learned focus on communication skills, prospecting, negotiating, account management or myriad other best practices used by top performers to educate, support and sustain peak results. Since sales turnover is inevitable and, as we've seen, even to a small extent potentially desirable, companies intent on deploying better on-boarding and training mechanisms for their sales teams are more likely to reap the rewards of that investment.

"You need a single repository for customer knowledge and access for all, with management buy-in to using it for sales mentoring and coaching.”

~ Hans Walter, CEO, GDC

Best-in-Class Steps to Success • Pay more attention to employee engagement. While

managing sales teams can appear to be more straightforward than most other parts of the enterprise – "did they hit their number or not?" – in reality there are plenty of nuances that make achieving success just as complex a challenge as with any group of employees. Much as Aberdeen research has directly linked corporate success with concrete efforts to measure and improve employee engagement scores (Effective Talent Management Drives Profitable Business Growth, July 2010), the Best-in-Class here are indeed twice as likely as Laggards to do the same. Yet with only a one-third adoption rate, even the top performers can benefit from enhanced efforts here.

• Leverage your CRM deployment by adding a compensation module to the core sales technology most frequently used by your team. Only half of the Best-in-Class take advantage of their CRM by






allowing sales reps to connect their opportunities and pipeline directly to past and potential commissions, bonuses and spiffs. This approach also provides a motivation for the team to use the CRM more frequently, driving adoption levels, which have often been associated through Aberdeen research with better performance, and which are optimally motivated more by "carrots" such as modules for compensation, forecasting, click-to-call and sales intelligence feeds, than by "sticks" such as withholding compensation due to insufficient CRM data entry.

Aberdeen Insights — Summary

As this research has demonstrated, sales performance management represents far more than the classical approach of assigning sales reps a quota, handing them product literature, price lists, accounts and a phone, and hoping for the best. With an emphasis on collaboration, engagement, teamwork and smart human capital management best practices, the Best-in-Class sales organizations are guiding, incenting, coaching, rewarding and especially informing their front-line "road warriors" with a plethora of enabling technologies, services and processes that help all parties – individual contributors, managers and the organization as a whole – achieve far greater results in terms of hitting quota, sustaining performance, reducing turnover, and contributing to a healthy business enterprise.



Appendix A: Research Methodology

In June and July 2010, Aberdeen examined the use, the experiences, and the intentions of 531 enterprises using services and technologies that impact the performance of their sales teams.

Study Focus

Responding executives, primarily in sales management roles, completed an online survey that included questions designed to determine the following:

√ The degree to which sales performance management practices and solutions are deployed in their organization and the impact they have on achieving their business goals

√ The structure, effectiveness and satisfaction with existing sales performance management implementations

√ Current and planned use of sales performance management to achieve desired changes in revenue, quota and deal size

√ The benefits, if any, that have been derived from sales performance management initiatives

The study aimed to identify emerging best practices for managing performance of sales teams, and to provide a framework by which readers could assess their own management capabilities.

Aberdeen supplemented this online survey effort with interviews with select survey respondents, gathering additional information on sales performance management strategies, experiences, and results.

Responding enterprises included the following:

• Job title: The research sample included respondents with the following job titles: CEO / President (26%), Manager (19%), EVP / SVP / VP (15%), Director (14%), General Manager/Managing Director (7%), Consultant (6%) and other (13%).

• Department / function: Survey respondents serve in the following departments or functions: sales and business development (53%), corporate management (17%), operations (8%), marketing (7%), and other (15%).

• Industry: Companies surveyed represented IT consulting and services (16%), software (15%), financial services (8%), construction/architecture/engineering services (6%), telecommunications equipment/services (6%), health/medical/dental devices & services (5%), industrial product/equipment manufacturing (4%), wholesale/distribution (4%), media/public relations (4%) and other (32%).

• Geography: The majority of respondents (74%) were from the Americas; remaining respondents were from the EMEA region (17%) and Asia-Pacific (9%).

• Company size: 12% of respondents were from large enterprises (annual revenues above US $1 billion); 24% were from midsize enterprises (annual revenues between $50 million and $1 billion); and 64% of respondents were from small businesses (annual revenues of $50 million or less).

• Headcount: 20% of respondents were from large enterprises (headcount greater than 1,000 employees); 24% were from midsize enterprises (headcount between 100 and 999 employees); and 56% of respondents were from small businesses (headcount between 1 and 99 employees).




Table 4: The PACE Framework Key

Overview Aberdeen applies a methodology to benchmark research that evaluates the business pressures, actions, capabilities, and enablers (PACE) that indicate corporate behavior in specific business processes. These terms are defined as follows: Pressures — external forces that impact an organization’s market position, competitiveness, or business operations (e.g., economic, political and regulatory, technology, changing customer preferences, competitive) Actions — the strategic approaches that an organization takes in response to industry pressures (e.g., align the corporate business model to leverage industry opportunities, such as product / service strategy, target markets, financial strategy, go-to-market, and sales strategy) Capabilities — the business process competencies required to execute corporate strategy (e.g., skilled people, brand, market positioning, viable products / services, ecosystem partners, financing) Enablers — the key functionality of technology solutions required to support the organization’s enabling business practices (e.g., development platform, applications, network connectivity, user interface, training and support, partner interfaces, data cleansing, and management)


Table 5: The Competitive Framework Key

Overview The Aberdeen Competitive Framework defines enterprises as falling into one of the following three levels of practices and performance: Best-in-Class (20%) — Practices that are the best currently being employed and are significantly superior to the Industry Average, and result in the top industry performance. Industry Average (50%) — Practices that represent the average or norm, and result in average industry performance. Laggards (30%) — Practices that are significantly behind the average of the industry, and result in below average performance.

In the following categories: Process — What is the scope of process standardization? What is the efficiency and effectiveness of this process? Organization — How is your company currently organized to manage and optimize this particular process? Knowledge — What visibility do you have into key data and intelligence required to manage this process? Technology — What level of automation have you used to support this process? How is this automation integrated and aligned? Performance — What do you measure? How frequently? What’s your actual performance?


Table 6: The Relationship Between PACE and the Competitive Framework

PACE and the Competitive Framework – How They Interact Aberdeen research indicates that companies that identify the most influential pressures and take the most transformational and effective actions are most likely to achieve superior performance. The level of competitive performance that a company achieves is strongly determined by the PACE choices that they make and how well they execute those decisions.





Appendix B: Related Aberdeen Research

Related Aberdeen research that forms a companion or reference to this report includes:

• Effective Talent Management Drives Profitable Business Growth; July 2010

• Sales Forecasting: Analytics to the Rescue!; June 2010

• Optimizing Lead-To-Win: Shrinking the Sales Cycle and Focusing Closers on Sealing More Deals; May 2010

• Providing a 360˚ View of the Customer: Better Service - Higher Sales; March 2010

• Sales Intelligence: Preparing for Smarter Selling; February 2010

• Inside Sales Enablement: "Let Them Drink Coffee!"; December 2009

• B2B TeleServices: The 2009 Buyer’s Guide, November 2009

• Sales Training: Translating Tribal Selling Knowledge Into Bottom-Line Productivity, September 2009

• Beyond Satisfaction: Engaging Employees to Retain Customers; July 2009

• The Carrot or the Stick? Competing Strategies for Sales Effectiveness (July, 2009)

• Sales Analytics: Hitting the Forecast Bulls-Eye; July, 2008

Information on these and any other Aberdeen publications can be found at www.aberdeen.com.

Author: Peter Ostrow, Research Director, Sales Effectiveness ([email protected])

Since 1988, Aberdeen's research has been helping corporations worldwide become Best-in-Class. Having benchmarked the performance of more than 644,000 companies, Aberdeen is uniquely positioned to provide organizations with the facts that matter — the facts that enable companies to get ahead and drive results. That's why our research is relied on by more than 2.2 million readers in over 40 countries, 90% of the Fortune 1,000, and 93% of the Technology 500.

As a Harte-Hanks Company, Aberdeen plays a key role of putting content in context for the global direct and targeted marketing company. Aberdeen's analytical and independent view of the "customer optimization" process of Harte-Hanks (Information – Opportunity – Insight – Engagement – Interaction) extends the client value and accentuates the strategic role Harte-Hanks brings to the market. For additional information, visit Aberdeen http://www.aberdeen.com or call (617) 723-7890, or to learn more about Harte-Hanks, call (800) 456-9748 or go to http://www.harte-hanks.com.

This document is the result of primary research performed by Aberdeen Group. Aberdeen Group's methodologies provide for objective fact-based research and represent the best analysis available at the time of publication. Unless otherwise noted, the entire contents of this publication are copyrighted by Aberdeen Group, Inc. and may not be reproduced, distributed, archived, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent by Aberdeen Group, Inc. (071309b)


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http://www.aberdeen.com/Aberdeen-Library/6284/RA-customer-experience-retention.aspx


http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/6228-RA-inside-sales-enablement.asp

http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/6226-RA-teleservices-lead-generation.asp

http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/6156-RA-sales-training-effectiveness.asp

http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/6156-RA-sales-training-effectiveness.asp


http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/perspective/6173-AI-sales-effectiveness-force-crm.asp

http://www.aberdeen.com/summary/report/benchmark/5134-RA-sales-analytics-forecast.asp


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Documents

Sales Performance Management: Getting Everyone On the Same ...hosteddocs.ittoolbox.com/sales-performance... · using compensation management, consulting, incentives, location intelligence,