I have had many sales jobs throughout my career and with the standard sales jobs, I have worked in many different managerial roles. I have worked as a sales manager across many different industries and in truth each of them are different to a certain extent. When it comes to monitoring the sales performance of your team, what you can and should measure will be different from industry to industry.

In broader terms, performance can certainly be measured into two different groups so to speak. These are essentially the primary and secondary markers. Firstly the primary markers are the more direct outcomes such as the amount of cash sales and even profit. The secondary markers could refer to the activities that have been taking place such as face to face calls or even the amount of appointments that have been booked. This can almost be looked at like a funnel of sorts, with the secondary markers being wider part of the funnel and the primary sales measures would be the narrow end.

Many people in managerial roles tend to follow the old approach of believing that if anything is measured it can be approved. This to many extents is true and there is good justification for it being the case. If you make it clear that you will be measuring an aspect of a sales person's work, they will believe that it is an important factor of the role. In addition to this, it will also provide an area of feedback which can help the person improve in future. These measurements can help an individual compete or aim to improve upon the performances of their fellow team members.

One of the mistakes that many managers in sales positions tend to make is to not measure the important factors well enough. Despite measuring various aspects of the roles, sometimes the importance of each factor is made clear to the sales person.

For example miscommunication could lead to a sales person working hard to chase some of the more secondary measures that you have set, such as the amount of on site visits that they are making on a monthly basis. This is all well and good, but if they are visiting people they know will accept a visist, but aren't likely to purchase on a frequent basis, they are distracting their attentions away from the primary goal - to make sales!


This article is written by Jonathan Walker of Sales Jobs