Identifying Top Performers in a Sales Force

Problem

A large consumer products company had engaged Go To Market Partners to identify the best practices of its existing sales force. After requesting a roster of their top salespeople, we received three conflicting lists from three different sources. Our most urgent tasks of the project then became to understand the reasons for these discrepancies and to identify a set of metrics that would reveal the actual high-performing salespeople.

Action

We discovered that the three lists were derived through completely different criteria. The first was compiled by the sales managers, who simply chose the salespeople they qualitatively considered the ‘best sellers’. The second was based on the sales organization’s performance evaluation system, which audited the salesperson’s strict adherence to their sales process. The third was a ranking of actual sales production, which was unadjusted for the strength of certain territories.

Since the first ranking was qualitative, the second ignored actual sales results, and the third was nothing more than a list of good territories, we had no satisfactory metrics to identify their best salespeople. We therefore worked with sales management to create a set of performance ratios that accurately portrayed the efficiency and effectiveness of their salespeople’s effort.

Result

With objective, quantifiable metrics, the client was able to track the actual performance of its sales force and identify the top performers across a range of relevant measures. The riddle of the best salespeople was solved, and the company reliably began to assess and improve its sales force’s capabilities.