sales performance dashboard

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Sales Performance Dashboard Overview

Managing your Sales Talent using the

Sales Performance Dashboard

Delivering unparalleled insight into the performance potential of any group of sales people, from a small team to a global corporate’s entire sales headcount, across each sales role, the Sales Performance Dashboard is ideal for use by the C-Suite and senior executives when creating and implementing sales talent management strategies:

The Sales Performance Dashboard indicates at-a-glance who your potential high-performing sales people are, who needs skills development or behaviour coaching, and who should be considered for redeployment. It also provides a vital overview of any sales organisation with percentages and numbers of your sales talent falling within various different ‘talent pools’.

It is also able to compare the performance potential of two groups such as teams from different geographies or, say, a single sales region or division against the whole organisation.

The Sales Performance Dashboard is available as an Excel-based report, and is delivered as standard with a built in set of analytical tools, enabling you to look in detail at the data within each talent pool.


To the left of the tool name – Sales Performance Dashboard – at the top you will find the sales role that the data relates to: in this case Sales Account Manager.

Below ‘Sales Performance Dashboard’ is the ‘main screen’ with the data points (each representing one individual’s assessment) plotted against their Skills (X axis) and Behaviour (Y axis) characteristics. The key towards the top left indicates the relevant areas of the chart: darker blue background for High-Performers; mid-blue for above average performers; and light blue for the below-average.

The foreground population — in this case Sales Account Managers — can be further interrogated using the analytical tools to the right of the main screen. These enable users to highlight the relevant talent according to the ‘talent pool’ they are in, or their critical reasoning ability — ‘all’, ‘high’, ‘mid’ or ‘low’ — or both; and see where they lie on the chart.

Thus, a user could opt to view, say, all High-Achiever sales talent with high critical reasoning ability; or all talent at whatever level of critical reasoning in a given talent pool; or all talent in a given talent pool with, say, high critical reasoning. These and many more combinations provide the critical information required to drive all the different approaches required to managing your sales talent.

“Let’s start by taking a quick look around the Sales Performance

Dashboard to see how it works.”


Example 1: A simple view showing one selected talent pool containing 10 people with a mix of critical reasoning levels. Note selected candidates are shown by lighter coloured bubbles

This group are above average in both behaviour and skill, compared to the global population of Sales Account Managers and hence they should all be performing at a good level. However, some will out-perform others even in this group.

The reason for this is two-fold; firstly, some will have higher critical reasoning and therefore will be more able to ‘think on their feet’ and react better in changing or less familiar situations; secondly, some will be more motivated to perform than others (see Team Dashboard or Sales Talent Assessment reports for this factor). However, the most important factor is that here you have a group with above average capability to perform – and you can see by candidate reference number (to the right of the chart) which sales people are in this group.

If you want to know where each person sits in the group, you can simply click on the relevant ‘bubble’ – as can be seen in the next chart (Example 2), where only those from this group with high critical reasoning have been selected.

“Looking more closely at the Sales Performance Dashboard.”


Example 2: Talent pool selected; high critical reasoning selected; individual candidate selected. Note selected candidates are shown by lighter coloured bubbles.

As can be seen – there are now only two highlighted candidates in this talent pool – these being those with high critical reasoning. One of these has been further selected (the red bubble) to identify the individual – in this case candidate reference number 3.

Once an individual candidate is identified, a highly detailed view of their capabilities can be found in either the associated Team Dashboard, or in the individual’s Sales Talent Assessment. These associated documents provide the depth of view to enable decisions to be made about this specific candidate – already identified as above average in this role and with a high level of critical reasoning.

These decisions could include selecting someone for a special assignment – or identifying the right person to work with a key customer for example, although many other decisions can be made with confidence from the rich data provided.

“Sales Performance Dashboard delivers the capability to make vital

decisions about deployment, hiring and development of your sales talent

with a very high level of confidence.”


Example 3: showing a group who are in a below average talent pool.

In this example, you can see that 6 sales people sit in a talent pool which is below average for behaviour, but where they are evidencing a level of skill – demonstrated by them being in the second block along the X (Skills)axis. This is not uncommon as sales people have often been trained to perform their role, but are rarely coached in the required behaviours to perform the role effectively.

Again, you would refer to the detailed analysis data as found in the Team Dashboard or the Sales Talent Assessment to see precisely what areas of skills and behaviour were most in need of development – and you may also filter further by critical reasoning level before making any decisions with a group such as this. What is clear is that this group is very likely to be under-performing and hence will be a competitive dis-advantage to your business whilst they remain in their current position on the chart.

What you may also note is that the small matrix to the left of the main matrix has been switched to show percentages rather than actual numbers of people. What this is now showing is that 44% of this sales team are below average in behaviour, despite them being overall an average to well-trained team. This means that close to half of this sales force are

“What about those sales people who are in the below average bands?”


likely to be performing below average – and hence are significantly dis-advantaging the firm overall.

Again, by looking at Example 3, you will see that 11% of the sales force (3 sales people in this case) is in the High-Performer talent pool.

You will also note that 44% of the sales people are in the above average band for both behaviour and skills. This is the backbone group of any sales force – the sales people who regularly and reliably achieve or exceed target. Yes, some could possibly become High-Performers over time, but the initial focus of any business seeing a chart like Example 3 should be to focus on retaining the 3 High-Performers, followed by a sift through the below average performers to determine who should be invested in – and who should be considered for replacement.

It should be noted that Sales Talent Assessment is Role specific, so whilst a sales person may not be suited to this particular role, they may well be high performers in another. However, what is clear is that 44% of this example team are negatively impacting on the revenue delivery potential of the firm and prompt action needs to be taken.

Example 4: Overlay chart showing one team compared to another

“Playing the percentages game to drive up the firm’s revenues.”

Outsourcing


Example 4 shows clearly the significant difference – and so explains performance differences – between two sales teams.

The foreground team are shown by the lighter coloured bubbles, with the background team shown by the darker bubbles. What can clearly be seen by comparing the two sets of percentage matrices on the left hand side is just how much stronger the ‘Business Services’ sales team is than the ‘Outsourcing’ sales team.

This serves to explain unequivocally, in an analytic and diagnostic way, the often perceived performance differences between teams.

Clearly there are many reasons that differences such as this happens. These can include differences in capability between Managers; differences in recruitment methods; or simply differences in quality of training and coaching provided to one team vs. another.

What is clear is that despite paying each sales person much the same levels of compensation, your return on investment will vary widely. Here is the sales talent management tool that at last provides business leaders with a means of tuning the revenue performance of their business, in much the same way that production approaches are tuned to deliver greater returns and improved efficiency.

To understand more how this powerful business tool can help drive up your revenues, please contact SalesAssesssment.com, or one of our accredited resellers, details of whom can be found on our web site at www.salesassessment.com

“Removing the question marks – direct, like-for-like comparisons of your

sales teams delivered via Sales Performance Dashboard overlays.”


Making sense of sales talent

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