5 Tips to Improve Sales Performance Modern Best Practice Guide Joe Fuster, Global Head of Customer Experience, Oracle

Adaptable Sales Strategies and Effective Execution

Are you setting unattainable targets? It seems counterintuitive, but 95% of Chief Sales Officers (CSOs) reported higher revenue targets1 and 86% are not very confident they can reach them.2

But the targets aren’t the only moving objects. With only 20% of sales people generating most of the revenue and long ramp-up times to get new ones up to speed1, effective sales performance management is more critical than ever before.

Those who can’t quickly adapt strategies and successfully implement them, risk both the company and personal revenue loss – in other words, their jobs.

With over 25 years in sales – 15 of those in sales management and 3 years in executive leadership, I’ve seen my share of sales failures and successes.

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Align Strategies

Analyze Performance

Collaborate with the Sales Team

Gamify Performance Dashboard

Simplify Activities and Processes

In that time, I’ve learned that if you want to be a sales leader who can easily adjust plans and withstand a barrage of obstacles, you’ll need the support of a knowledgeable sales team, modern best practice processes, and technology.

With this holistic approach, you can design the optimal plans and effectively implement them to drive performance.

This brief will act as your roadmap with tips about how best to utilize people, processes, and technology to improve your company’s sales performance.

Sales Performance Management (SPM) is defined as a comprehensive solution that helps organizations drive sales alignment from strategy through to execution, while improving efficiency, accuracy and timeliness of the associated administrative processes.3

5 Tips to Improve Sales Performance

Sources: 1 CSO Insights, “Sales Management and Optimization Study: 2015 Key Trends Analysis” 2015. 2 Accenture, “Powering Profitable Sales Growth” 2014. 3 Brian Hartlen Sales Performance Management Blog, “What is Sales Performance Management?”

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Align Strategies

Acquire Talent, Revenue, Leads, and Content

Align Strategies to Acquire Talent, Revenue, Leads, and Content

HR: Find and keep sales talent

Company and Finance: Ensure sales success = company success

Marketing: Get good, timely, qualified leads and relevant content

The people who contribute to sales success or failure often come from outside the sales team.

Whether you’re trying to acquire and retain sales talent, develop incentive plans that promote company objectives, or get good leads and relevant content, alignment with stakeholders in other departments can help you succeed.

For example, 96% of leading firms have sales compensation policies aligned with their business objectives.5

By maintaining a regular dialog with stakeholders, you can have more confidence that your team will consistently perform well.

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Sources: 4 CSO Insights, “Sales Performance Optimization Study: 2015 Sales Management Analysis” 2015. 5 MHI Research Institute, Decoding the Decision Dynamic, Executive Summary, 2015. 6 IBID

Pervasive complexity is the enemy of clarity and productivity.

For example, overuse of manual processes waste a sales person’s precious selling time while amassing avoidable errors and inaccuracies.

Also, disconnected systems hinder a sales representative from getting a complete customer view.

As a result, sales productivity has taken a big hit. Sales people spend 2/3 of their time on non-selling (mostly administrative) tasks.7

In contrast, 80% Best-in-Class firms minimize the number of people, departments, and steps to develop and deliver a sales quote or proposal.8

Simplifying your activities and processes can help you provide clear direction, maximize productivity, reduce errors, and control costs.

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Simplify Activities and Processes Drive Productivity and Shorten Deal Time

Simplify to Drive Productivity and Shorten Deal Time

Reduce number of priorities/objectives

Standardize on modern best practice

Unify and cleanse data

Apply rules-based automation

Employ a mobile-first strategy

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Source: 7 Accenture, “Powering Profitable Sales Growth” 2014. 8 Aberdeen “CRM + Sales Workflow: Removing the Friction from Your Pipeline,” February 2015

Hone Sales Strategies and Drive Effectiveness

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Analyze Performance

Gone are the days of gut-driven decisions in business. Right? Not even close. Only 30% of companies use analytics and less than half of those do so to identify additional sales opportunities.9

The desire to be “data-driven” is expressed often –particularly as targets grow out of reach and market dynamics evolve. Yet, many teams lack the culture, measures, technology, and analytic know-how to infuse analyses into important decision-making.

The proof of analytics’ effectiveness is easy to find. For example, teams that employ sales analytics grow team quota attainment at four times the rate of non-adopters.10

Every phase of the sales/sales performance management processes can benefit from the use of analytics… from sales strategy to sales coaching to incentive compensation.

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Sources: 9 Accenture, “Powering Profitable Sales Growth,” 2014. 10 Aberdeen, “Sales effectiveness 2015: How in the World Are We Going to Hit Our Number?” June 2015.

Model / hone strategy

Detect & pre-empt underperforming behaviors

Identify revenue-generating behaviors

Discover opportunities

Design more effective compensation plans

Identify outliers and manage exceptions

Analyze Data to Make Informed Decisions

Why is it that the majority of companies surveyed report that they don’t effectively share best practices across sales teams? 11

One reason could be that nearly three quarters of those surveyed do not consider their CRM system very effective enabling collaboration.12

Fortunately, social tools have become commonplace in the office. Social tools do not refer to Facebook and Twitter. Enterprise social collaboration utilizes social technologies to foster inter-company collaborations.

Whether you are strategizing with the key account team, rolling out new territories or coaching new sales executives, social collaboration can be an effective means of optimizing sales performance.

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Collaborate with the Sales Team Improve Performance and Further Opportunities

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Use Social Collaboration to Advance Opportunities

Share best practices

Roll out new strategies

Communicate with Key Account team members and stakeholders

“In my experience, the most effective sales organizations use social collaboration to share best practices. This furthers opportunities and drives performance.”

Joe Fuster, Author, Global Head of Customer Experience, Oracle

Sources: 11 CSO Insights, “Sales Performance Optimization Study: 2015 Sales Management Analysis” 2015. 12 MHI Research Institute, “Decoding the Decision Dynamic, Executive Summary” 2015 . 13 CSO Insights, “Sales Performance Optimization Study: 2015 Sales Management Analysis” 2015 .

In fact, the companies who share best practices exceedingly well realized 91% of overall plan attainment.13

Cash incentives may be king, but gamification rules! For the top performing sales organizations in the past year, there has been a twelve-fold increase in the number of sales execs omitting monetary incentives from their list of top three motivators.14

Visually stimulating and rewarding, the use of game mechanics in the form of contests, games, leaderboards, etc. drive team and individual quota attainment. In fact, game-mechanics users realized 71% greater quota attainment15 and grew their average deal size at twice the pace as compared to non-adopters.16

Why does it work? With gamification, competitive sales executives can track their performance as compared to their peers and secure their spot on the top of the leader board. Also, sales leaders use gamification to execute their sales strategies in a fun and “sticky” way, promote best practice behaviors, further motivate, and reward their sales teams.

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Gamify Performance Dashboard Motivate Sales Behaviors and Drive Quota Attainment

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Sources: 14 Aberdeen “Incenting Success: Best-in-Class Sales Management,” April 2014 15 Aberdeen, “Non-Cash-Sales Incentives” April 2015. 16 Aberdeen, “Gamification in B2B Sales: Is It Time? (Part II)” May 2014. 17 IBID

Gamification is defined as the use of game mechanics to motivate, modify, or reward distinct behaviors17

Provide non-cash incentives

Motivate and foster accountability

Track individual performance

Promote best practice behaviors

Gamify to Motivate Sales Behaviors and Drive Quota Attainment

These processes are inspired by Oracle Sales Performance Management - a complete solution with advanced modeling capabilities to optimize territories, quotas, and incentive compensation plans as well as sales productivity and coaching tools to improve sales executive effectiveness.

Putting it All Together

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Amidst market changes and business priorities, how do the most successful sales leaders adapt and execute strategies to boost performance? They rely on the people to hire the right talent, promote the right culture, standardize on the right processes, and implement the right technology. The “right” sales performance processes are ones that leverage today’s technology to drive performance, productivity, accountability, and collaboration. These processes must be optimized for simplicity, repeatability, and automation.

“5 Tips” in Action: Utilizing today’s technology, Oracle Modern Best Practice for Sales Performance Management details three best practice processes supported by customer success videos, webcasts, white papers, and more to help you bridge the gap between sales plans and performance.

Sales Strategy to Execution Develop Strategies that Drive Performance

Coaching Plan to Performance Increase Sales Effectiveness

Incentive Plan to Payment Effective & Streamlined Incentive Compensation

SOCIAL & BIG DATA: Providing Insight, and Fostering Collaboration Customers use social media to get peer opinions, lodge complaints, and even make purchases. Digital behavior (captured as big data) helps us learn about customers. Sales people collaborate and share best practices using internal social tools. The fact is, you can put the best tools in place, but doing so won’t ensure their adoption. To be effective, stakeholders must embrace and employ technology. In a true best practice, people, process and technology work in concert with one another.

Technology is only one piece of the puzzle, but it is an important one. Once employed, the right technology can help you generate the competitive advantage your business has been lacking. Here are some of today’s technology that you can utilize to improve sales performance.

CLOUD: Making the Best Applications Business-Accessible The cloud enables you to purchase software & IT resources as a service. Sales / CRM / SPM Cloud applications help sales people sell productively and effectively throughout the entire sales process. ANALYTICS: Driving Sound Decisions Analytics provide the insights you need to make the best decisions and create more effective, granular, and measurable plans. Look at dashboards showing your KPIs & metrics in real time to see how your sales team is performing.

MOBILE & LOCATION-AWARE: Enabling Wherever, Whenever Access A mobile-first strategy enables you to securely access sales / CRM applications to make updates to plans, forecasts, etc. from your mobile device or tablet and plan customer visits / sales activities while on the road.

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Technologies that Drive Modern Best Practices

Source: 18 Accenture, “Powering Profitable Sales Growth” 2014.

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Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 5 Tips for Improving Sales Performance October 2015 Authors: Joe Fuster, Becca Goren

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