Sales performance: How to track and improve the performance of your sales team

Your sales team is critical to your organisation’s success. If your reps aren’t meeting their targets, the whole business could be in trouble. But how can you tell if they’re doing everything possible to generate, qualify, and convert leads—and then turn them into loyal customers?

The answer is simple. You evaluate sales performance. How? By selecting sales performance metrics and measuring activities and results against them.

Keep reading to learn how to track sales performance and improve it by setting clear goals, using the right strategies, and streamlining processes with sales Ai.

What is “sales performance”?

Sales performance is a measurement of how effectively your organisation is meeting its sales targets in a given period of time. You can evaluate sales activity and results on an individual, team, or company basis and compare it to expectations or previous time periods.

Measuring sales performance enables you to monitor productivity and the efficiency of your sales processes. With robust sales performance management, you can keep an eye on metrics like conversion rates and acquisition costs, and find areas for improvement.

Measuring sales performance

So, how do you measure sales performance?

First, you’ll need to decide which metrics and KPIs are most important to your business and find a way to collect, track, and analyse the data. It’s best to have a centralised platform where you can do this in one place (like Dialpad Sell, for example).

Whether you evaluate your sales performance every month, every quarter, or on an annual basis, you should be regularly monitoring progress towards your goals and uncovering valuable insights for decision-making and resource allocation.

Plus, you can see which reps need extra help—and implement Ai sales coaching where needed.

Every organisation has its own definition of what makes for good sales performance. Yours will be based on your industry, the products and services you sell, the composition of your sales team, and the current market conditions.

Now, let’s look at how to work out what represents “good” for your organisation and if you’re living up to it. (If not, there are lots of steps you can take to get back on track.)

Sales performance metrics and KPIs to track

It’s important to choose the right sales performance indicators for your specific team and business. Here are some of the most commonly used ones:

• Total revenue: This is the entire income generated from all marketing and sales activities, or the quantity of products and services sold multiplied by the price of the product or service.

• Revenue by salesperson or team: This is the income generated by individual reps and the sales team as a whole. You can also measure revenue by product.

• Revenue by new or existing customers: This shows which segment is bringing the most money and where you need to focus your efforts.

• Quota attainment: This shows whether a rep or team has met the sales quota you’ve set for them over a specific period.

• Win rate: This is the percentage of closed sales deals compared to the total number of sales deals.

• Conversion rate: This shows the leads or prospects that successfully convert into buyers, represented as a percentage of total opportunities.

• Average deal size/Average order value: This is the average monetary value of each sale. Subscription-based services like SaaS can use average contract value instead.

• Average sales cycle length: This is the time it takes for leads to go through the entire sales funnel.

• Average lead response time: This shows how long it takes for reps to respond to a new lead.

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): This represents the total expenses you incurred in acquiring a new customer.

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This is the total revenue you expect to generate from one customer throughout their entire relationship with the business.

• Churn rate: This is the percentage of lost customers or deals during a specific part of the sales process. Churn rates are typically measured by subscription-based businesses with recurring revenue.

How to improve sales performance

Now we know what sales performance means and the metrics available for measuring it. But, if your team is struggling to hit its targets, what can you do to improve sales performance?

1. Give hiring and onboarding the attention they deserve

Effective sales performance starts with having the right people for the job, so the first thing to do is to make sure you’re hiring the right people.

Yes, it’s vital that your reps have the relevant skills and experience, but you also need people who will fit into your team and the wider company culture.

Your job descriptions should clearly mention company culture and values as well as the required qualifications. Get to know candidates thoroughly via interviews (online or in person). There’s no guarantee that a qualified candidate automatically equals an improvement in team sales performance yet, but look out for a willingness to learn and undergo further training.

Once you’ve taken on a new hire, you need to get them onboarded as quickly and smoothly as possible. Make sure they’re equipped with the right tools, and offer comprehensive training alongside knowledge bases where they can easily find customer information and product details.

There are several contact centre software features that help with onboarding, such as coaching tools and call recording playlists to get new hires up to speed.

Dialpad Sell, for example, has these features along with automated Ai Playbooks, which turn your sales methodology into an easy-to-follow template for reps to follow during sales calls.

Simply use one of the pre-built templates (based on popular sales methodologies like BANT or SPICED) or create your own—and Dialpad Ai will help monitor calls for adherence:

2. Set clear objectives and be transparent with your team

By setting clear objectives, you can get your team in the right mindset for the task ahead. Your goals should be attainable and measurable, and have a definite time frame.

For example, don’t just say you aim to increase conversions. Say that you want to increase it by 20% over a six-month period. The SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Driven) is a great starting place for goal-setting.

It’s also important to be transparent about how you’ll measure performance. Share the metrics, KPIs, and benchmarks you’re using, and let the team know how and when they’ll be assessed. What are the criteria for success? Which sales methodologies should they stick to? (More on those shortly).

Dialpad Sell provides an Ai Scorecards feature that analyses calls and helps grade performance, and you can also record calls for playback later. Whatever evaluation tools you use, share the results with individual reps at regular reviews and discuss how they can improve their performance.

Let them know that sales training is ongoing and always available.

3. Adopt the right sales methodology for your team

By using a sales methodology, reps have a consistent framework to follow during interactions with leads. This helps to standardise their activities and improve efficiency. But which one should you choose? There are numerous options, so it’s about picking one that best suits your business and team.

For example, the SNAP (Simple, iNvaluable, Align, and Priorities) and BANT sales (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) methodologies are designed to be simple enough for newer reps to use.

Basically, these frameworks are aimed at qualifying leads quickly by asking simple, targeted questions. They’re suitable for short sales cycles.

If you want your reps to go more in depth with lead qualification, you can choose a methodology that involves more open-ended questions. Those such as “gap” selling and consultative selling see the reps acting as trusted advisors, learning about the prospect’s challenges, desires, and perceptions.

These methodologies are more time-consuming and suited to longer sales cycles.

4. Streamline workflows and shorten sales cycles with automation and Ai

Another way to increase sales performance is to streamline your sales processes for maximum efficiency. You can do this through Ai and sales automation, which gives reps more time to focus on selling instead of searching for information or carrying out manual tasks like data entry.

Dialpad is packed with time-saving tools for sales teams. Simply turn on Dialpad Ai to automatically transcribe all calls, and the platform also automatically logs calls, transcripts, and notes in your CRM through its native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and more.

Ai Recaps deliver instant call summaries and recommended action items, so there’s no need for note-taking. Here’s how that looks:

You can also accelerate your outreach efforts by implementing a power dialler via the Dialpad and Salesforce integration, eliminating tedious manual dialling (and errors). For cold outreach teams, the voicemail drop feature lets reps record a single message and “drop” it with a click if the prospect doesn’t pick up the phone.

When reps are communicating across multiple platforms, Dialpad’s single app makes it easy for them to call, message, and meet with teammates and prospects in one place, as well as transfer calls and move conversations between devices with just a few taps.

5. Coach your team in real-time and at scale

If you’re overseeing a large team of sales reps, it can be difficult to give everyone the coaching they need.

Too often, analysis of interactions only takes place after the event—when it’s too late to go back and change the outcome of a negative call or a lost deal. With Dialpad Ai, you get real-time, automated coaching.

We already mentioned the helpful Ai Playbooks that help reps follow the team’s sales methodology, but there are plenty of other coaching tools too.

For instance, Dialpad Ai alerts you to struggling agents while the call is ongoing so you can offer support as soon as it’s needed. (It also recommends which completed calls should be reviewed later.) Managers can view a list of all current calls and keep an eye on live sentiment analysis, which reveals if a conversation is going positively or badly. If you spot negative sentiment, you can click into the real-time transcript for more detail and then decide if you need to step in to save the sale.

There’s also the Ai Assistant, which instantly answers reps’ questions by automatically pulling in data from your connected knowledge sources and systems. For example, if a prospect is asking about small business pricing, Dialpad Ai can automatically search for the relevant pricing sheet and pop up the link for the sales re.

Instead of spending hours listening to recordings and grading calls every week, sales leaders can use Ai Scorecards to automatically evaluate and grade every interaction against pre-set metrics.

6. Use your quantitative and qualitative sales data

Sales data can reveal customer preferences, which are valuable for personalization, segmentation, and upselling opportunities.

With streamlined processes empowering your reps to make more calls, you’ll be able to gather more data from prospects and customers. You can use this to your advantage in different ways, from spotting new opportunities to checking that your sales methodologies are working effectively.

Dialpad Sell makes it easy to access both real-time and historical data. The Ai Coaching Hub gives you full visibility into team performance, with leaderboards showing results for individuals, teams, and departments. This helps you to understand the effectiveness of tools and coaching over time.

You can also see how adherence to your playbook translates into smoother pipelines and increased revenue.

Thanks to Dialpad Ai’s conversational intelligence tools, you can spot trends and patterns, get ahead of potential issues, and make informed decisions.

7. Tap into the expertise and experience of your sales team

Analysing the data is essential, but it’s not the only way to find out how well your sales team is doing. It’s important that you speak to your reps and gather feedback. After all, they’re the ones on the frontline, which gives them unique insights about what works and what doesn’t.

Find out what they’ve learned from using a certain methodology and from talking to prospects and customers. Do they have any ideas for improvement? You can then use their input to improve your tools, training and coaching, and overall sales strategies.

When you really listen to your team and act on their feedback, they’re more likely to be engaged and supportive of organisational goals. That’s good for employee retention, and it encourages a company culture where everyone pulls together for the bigger picture.

Improve sales performance with Dialpad Sell

Choose the right metrics for measuring performance, and you’ll soon work out which areas are in need of improvement. Then, it’s just a case of giving your sales team the tools they need to boost performance.

It’s not just about software either—the right “tools” also include clear objectives, transparent communication, ongoing training, and objective, data-driven feedback. But, of course, the right software tools are essential, too.

Today, Ai and automation are key to sales performance improvement since they speed up time-consuming processes and deliver valuable insights into rep performance, customer behaviour, and sales opportunities.

With Dialpad Sell, you’ll have everything you need to automate manual tasks like setting up custom playbooks, monitor and analyse calls, and offer live coaching and assistance.