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Ventana Research finds that sales performance is most often measured by quota achievement, or simply "making the numbers." When this happens, by almost any means, organizations find ample reason not to be concerned with people, processes, or enabling technology. The new realities of today's economic and investment climate have moved many organizations to drive for higher sales productivity and performance. Quotas are more difficult to achieve, fewer quota-carrying sales representatives are stretched to deliver on growth goals, process adoption and adaptation is increasingly recognized as a crucial foundation for building excellence, and enlightened sales organizations are relying on enabling technology to bootstrap sales performance improvement initiatives.

A common approach often taken to sales performance management is to measure and report on sales results, replete with year-over-year, quarterly, quota, forecast, and plan comparisons. This has been the stuff of business intelligence from day one. There is clearly value in this approach to evaluating outcomes, but it doesn't paint the entire picture. It provides little color or insight into the selling process, nor does it link outcomes to performance improvement in individuals.

Ventana Research asserts that creative sales performance management will be enabled by vendors capable of linking outcomes reporting not only to inside-out goals and objectives, but also to outside-in sales drivers and causal factors. Business intelligence vendors most often respond to the quest for more advanced capability with vertical industry solutions and special metrics or KPIs. A more enlightened approach provides the capacity to directly tie outcome metrics and reporting to organizational and individual objectives, thus enabling more direct alignment of performance up and down the organizational hierarchy. Newer and fancier reporting capability is no longer the path of advancement. Real progress involves innovative application of dashboards and scorecards.

Sales force automation (SFA) applications are most often linked to sales performance management. Frequently billed as field sales support applications, the value proposition is more often one of sales management support: monitor, measure and report on pipeline status, build a bottom-up expected value forecast, and assess quota performance of managed sales personnel. It provides the manager with metrics and tools to understand what happened or didn't happen (both in the past tense) in last month's quest for quota.

Ventana Research gives high marks to a more advanced class of sales application that embraces robust sales process and delivers sales coaching and learning capability into the context of SFA. The focus is on interpreting the condition of the pipeline, applying sales methodology rules and techniques, and aiding the sales person in prioritizing and determining the most appropriate next steps (future tense) toward closure. In the simplest of terms, the application is designed to help a sales person sell. A few large vendors of SFA applications have this coaching capability embedded in their offerings, but none features it. This type of enabling technology in support of tactical selling skills development is simply not often part of ongoing training, education, and learning platforms for the sales organization. They are an important feature of sales performance improvement on their own merit.

Rewards and incentives have always been considered the most direct means to aligning sales effort with organizational objectives. In order to elevate sales performance meaningfully, incentive programs should evolve on a couple of dimensions. One area begging to be addressed is the balance between base and incentive pay and the effective alignment of both components in concert with organizational objectives. Organizations are also seeking greater flexibility for absorbing and enabling quick and frequent modification of incentives as conditions and priorities change. More than tweaking "the plan," real flexibility comes only with effective means to link changes to performance improvement up and down the enterprise command chain and then effecting the necessary re-learning across the sales organization.

Ventana Research also expects the new focus on sales process and attention to performance improvement to further manifest itself in advanced functionality in the realm of knowledge management for sales, such as content and procedures for generating proposals and deal configuration tools. Hosted solutions will also be on most evaluation short lists, continuing a trend that emerged during 2003.

A look at why the selling culture often appeals to athletes highlights the need and importance of sales process and enabling technologies to elevate "team" sales performance. Aside from the obvious common success attributes such as competitiveness, self-motivation, and win-loss records, there are more subtle points of comparison. Athletics and sales are both professions that provide easily measured outcomes, relatively quick feedback on performance, and frequent opportunity to learn from defeat. Natural athletes, like natural salespersons, are often egocentric and resistant to being cast in a role under a system or process control. Even more importantly, individual success does not guarantee team or group success - in fact, success disparity among the "players" often breeds contempt and destroys the organization. Thus the importance of sales process and enabling technology in elevating sales performance of all participants to complement the star performers.

Recent successes of the New England Patriots and Oakland A's provide good examples. Team success in each case is often attributed to a "no stars" approach - the system (process), practice habits and conditioning (enabling technology), and the athlete's coach-ability (sales rep's manageability) are at least as important as the athlete's traditional skills. Process, technology, and people are all critical to improving performance and accountability in sales. The vendors that position their solutions to help organizations address all three bring the greatest sustaining value.

Assessment

Ventana Research encourages organizations to focus on productive ways it can best balance sales performance management software and analytical applications with its business and sales cultural realities. Successful companies cannot accomplish this without taking a challenging road less traveled.

The sales organization must be challenged to evaluate and understand how adaptive sales process and its effective implementation can drive real sales performance improvement. Sales process cannot be left solely to classroom training and role-playing sessions.

The IT organization must be willing to think outside the operational SFA box in delivering value to sales performance improvement. Technology can bring much more to sales performance than formatted collection of subjective selling-behavior metrics and reporting on the revenue outcomes of sales effort.

Challenge vendors to articulate how they will promote sales process consistency, deliver learning potential at the tactical level, and enable top-to-bottom aligned incentives with flexibility. Seek out those vendors that bring proactive selling analytics and innovative dashboards to their solutions.