Four Ways Sales Performance Management (SPM) Keeps Sales Team Productive

In the realm of sales, the buzzword of the moment is Sales Performance Management (SPM), which not only focuses on compensation management but also incorporates software solutions to monitor day-to-day sales activities. Effective sales performance management is a combination of software and management of people that trains the sales team to evaluate data, manage quotas, discover possibilities to improve, and so on. This training helps the sales force be more successful. Through the implementation of SPM systems, companies of all sizes and operating in a wide range of industries are able to improve their sales operations and experience growth at the organizational level. It is anticipated that the size of the global SPM market will increase from USD 1.5 billion in 2020 to USD 3.4 billion by 2026, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.9% during the course of the forecast.

Also read: Why is Sales Performance Management important?

Leading SPM solutions from Varicent enable businesses to scale their digital operations. Through a centralized platform, Varicent delivers critical information, insights, and tools that boost performance, productivity, and revenue for businesses. Ultimately, SPM solutions help sales representatives, sales teams, and organizations improve their sales operations to achieve their business and revenue goals.

Here’s a closer look at how sales performance management helps enhance the employee experience:

Encourages employee training and development

It is essential for every sales representative to adapt to the constantly evolving market and trends. This is even more important now with hybrid and remote working models in place. SPM solutions enable businesses to put together training opportunities for their sales team. Its mobile presence facilitates anywhere, anytime access to the training resources. Additionally, it helps keep track of how sales representatives are doing at every stage of their training, identifies those who are underperforming, and the precise areas that require improvement.

The team benefits from the training by learning new approaches that will be useful in their daily work tasks and by staying current with their skills. However, it helps the sales representatives become subject-matter experts by helping them learn new sales tactics, methods, channels, and so on. All in all, sales training helps improve, maintain, and manage the organization’s sales performance. 

Keeps employees motivated

What keeps a sales team motivated? Though the answer might be subjective to each individual, achieving targets or business goals is a major source of inspiration and engagement for any sales representative. Setting clear expectations further motivates the sales workforce to achieve these goals. The way to do this is by setting sales quotas for each individual or team and implementing processes. Quotas must be set correctly; if they are too high, the sales team will quickly become demotivated, and if they are too low, high commission costs can incur losses to the organization. The right SPM software such as Varicent helps make informed decisions and set realistic sales quotas by accessing real-time data. 

Furthermore, SPM increases transparency with regard to compensation plans. The sellers need to know the compensation amount, the goals, quotas, and key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with this compensation, the timelines, and everything in between to stay motivated. Sellers are motivated and inspired to keep working hard when variable compensation is transparent.

Enhances team communication 

The expectations for each individual representative, the sales team, and the organization as a whole need to be communicated clearly throughout the workforce. Varicent SPM solutions, with features such as messaging and chatbots, eliminate long email threads and phone conversations and help address and solve common queries instantly and easily. Additionally, the features make it simple to resolve disagreements and misunderstandings. The streamlined communication process creates a positive employee experience and helps facilitate trust between the sales team, management, and the entire organization.

See how Vatsa leveraged SPM solutions to help a US-based healthcare organization align their sales operations with their business goals for multifold growth.

Maintains a positive team culture

Due to SPM’s transparent compensation processes, organizations can avoid over-or underpaying the sales team, resulting in a more focused and motivated workforce. The transparency, streamlined communication, and collaboration provided by the Varicent SPM solutions help build a positive work culture that aligns with the company’s core values. Gamification integrated with SPM also helps celebrate all wins, understand weak spots upon failure, and improve them. This not only helps with talent retention but greatly aids talent acquisition. Overall, fostering a positive work environment is crucial because a skilled, engaged workforce is what drives sales performance and organizational success.

For organizations, sales performance management by Varicent is a blessing as it helps streamline operations, discover new opportunities, develop reports and forecasts, and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace. It also provides leadership counsel to sales leaders to improve decision-making and enhance strategies. 

Vasta’s sales performance management solution helps optimize your revenue growth, boost efficiency, and implement better planning to provide remarkable performance both internally and externally.

Contact our experts at contact@vsplc.com to learn more.

Why Is Sales Performance Management (SPM) Important?

In the current economy, most operations can be considered as sales. But the question is, given such an abundance, how can businesses optimize their sales approach? This especially applies to businesses whose trajectory keeps changing directions frequently. Well, that’s what Sales Performance Management (SPM) can help with!

What is Sales Performance Management?

Gartner defines Sales Performance Management as “A suite of operational and analytical functions that automate and unite back-office operational sales processes, and are implemented to improve operational efficiency and effectiveness.”

The target of SPM deployment is to meet business performance measures. Varicent provides industry-leading SPM solutions. An SPM software, such as the one Varicent offers, helps enterprises magnify their digital operations. SPM creates functionality across departments, such as compelling horizontal and vertical communication advantages. It results in desired sales numbers using tactical strategies.

Why is Sales Performance Management Important?

SPM’s core capabilities include

  • Territory Management (TM)
  • Incentive Compensation Management (ICM)
  • Quota Management (QM)
  • Objectives Management (OM)
  • Advanced Analytics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Gamification
  • Mobile Apps

SPM is helping businesses, large and small, across various sectors improve their sales operations. For example, SPM helped United Rentals to automate calculations, manage adjustments and approvals, build models, and view performance and trends. This enabled them to improve the effectiveness of their compensation programs continuously.

Similarly, owing to SPM, numerous other businesses have witnessed tremendous improvements and growth. Thus, businesses yet to implement SPM tools at their workplace are rushing to reap the benefits. In fact, the global market size for SPM is projected to grow at a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of around 15% between 2020 and 2026.

SPM innovation is a way of sales performance enhancement that brings leaders together. They can overtake the competition irrespective of what they are selling. In a gist, SPM allows sales managers to impact and improve all sales touchpoints. Here’s how sales performance management benefits organizations to streamline processes and scale business: 

What are the Benefits of Sales Performance Management?

Generating Analytics

Long gone are the days of intuitive decisions. Compensation is now proportionate to the performances of the sales force, and the credit goes to SPM. A data-backed analytical system keeps a real-time tap on performances. Gratification is one of the outcomes. Performance stats allow a business to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the sales infrastructure. SPM software today generates exceptional insights to quantify results. Goals are defined and classified in the right manner, backed by purely analyzed data.

Predicting Future Sales

With advanced data capturing, monitoring, and analyzing capabilities, SPM tools help forecast future sales accurately. This helps with employee compensation, business planning and strategizing, and making other business-related decisions more precisely. For instance,  with the help of SPM, MetaCompliance has been able to:

  • Drive greater revenue predictability
  • Eliminate intuition bias within the forecasting process and make data-driven decisions
  • Achieve sales adoption of the product to boost clean data entry and improve forecasting data hygiene
  • Enhance visibility to provide a more accurate view of the pipeline

Enabling Execution

The factors of integration and distribution make a significant impact. However, execution also matches the weightage. There are many boxes to tick here – the compilation of assigned tasks, the balance of on-site task assimilation, setting the numbers right, etc. 

Once the structures across departments are adequately figured out, sales can accelerate. Instruments like gamification to manage and measure sales success are all possible additional SPM components. They help keep sales on course. These components may be and easily connected using an AI-led edge solution to sales quality management created to natively handle the unique needs of IT, sales, and finance.

Bringing in Transparency

SPM puts it all on the table. Daily notifications on the activities support the employees’ updates on everything. It is practically impossible to keep a note of and revise everything, especially with numerous processes operating at once. An SPM software generates real-time notifications and creates utmost transparency. Not only is everyone up to date, but also in check with the timelines. SPM will revamp data structures and standardize the in-house performance with no effect from the external environment.

For example, Colt could instantly identify their mistakes with payments due to real-time notifications provided by the SPM solution by Varicent. Thus, their employees could ensure that they charged customers the correct fees. This helped boost accountability and led to 30% sales team growth.

Here’s how we helped a US-based healthcare and insurance company leverage Varicent’s Sales Performance Management platform (SPM) to streamline its sales operations. 

Summing Up

Sales Performance Management is a boon for organizations, providing them with an edge in sales processes. SPM solutions, like Varicent, have enabled businesses to strategize operations effectively, enhance sales opportunities, and embark on a journey of continuous, sustained growth.

Now that you have understood what SPM is and what benefits you can derive for your business, you might be looking for a robust and agile SPM tool to implement at your workplace. You can check out Vasta’s sales performance management solution that can help you create adaptable strategies and own your revenue growth. Contact our experts at contact@vsplc.com to know more.