Sales performance management requires a dynamic approach.
Sales Performance Management (SPM) is the strategic process of planning and managing sales operations to drive revenue growth and align sales behaviors with business goals.
Sales Planning consists of territory planning, quota setting, incentive compensation plan design, and performance analytics. Throughout the year, sales operations teams need to manage territory definitions and sales quotas as go-to-market and personnel changes occur. They need to calculate sales incentive earnings through an incentive compensation management (ICM) platform, as well as monitor incentive plan performance and launch additional short-term incentives as needed to guide the sales team behavior.
While many organizations treat SPM as a once-a-year exercise, the reality is far more dynamic. SPM requires agility for sales operations teams to continuously adapt to changes in market conditions, product portfolio, organizational structure, and personnel.
These best practices can help you get the most out of your sales performance management operations:
Deploying SPM solutions in the right way is key to building a sustainable, scalable process that evolves as the go-to-market needs change. At Spaulding Ridge, we built our ASPYR and ACHEVE frameworks to outline our approach to deploying SPM technologies based on 100+ SPM and ICM projects over our 8 years as a company to help our clients succeed.
Sales planning with ASPYR
Spaulding Ridge’s ASPYR framework breaks sales planning into five actionable steps:
- Assess the market: Evaluate the total value of each customer and prospect in your customer universe based on propensity to buy and total potential spend.
- Segment to potential: Group customers by key characteristics and future potential (not just past spend) in order to align sales resources to highest value accounts to maximize growth.
- Produce capacity: Determine optimal headcount to reach top-line ambition through detailed headcount plans that help align hiring plans with corporate goals.
- Yield equitable coverage: Assign customers to sales territories based on sales team and role definitions and ensure balanced, fair territories with equal opportunity.
- Realign quota: Set financial targets/quotas at all levels of the sales organization using an approach that balances top-down ambitions with bottom-up analysis of customer potential, historical performance, competitive dynamics and rep performance.
Sales operations execution with ACHEVE
Spaulding Ridge’s ACHEVE framework helps customers deliver and continuously improve sales operations execution:
- Administer people and plans. Oversee timely, comprehensive administration of all people and plans, and calculating all pay components and draws in a single system.
- Calculate performance to goal. Track performance and crediting of sales performance, and provide real-time visibility to sales team
- Handle statements and pay. Execute accurate, error free payout calculations that eliminate “shadow-accounting” time spent by the reps that calculate their own pay, handle disputes workflows effectively with right payout approval systems in place.
- Evaluate opportunity stage. Look beyond historical sales, and help sales reps to understand what their pipeline is worth in earnings through “what-if” modelling.
- Variance to plan modelling. Track compensation spend vs. budget while providing compensation spend visibility to finance and enabling scenario variance modelling.
Evolve coverage & goals. Continuously track and manage territory-account assignment changes and quota changes that happen due to organization changes and sales rep turnover.
Why leverage the Salesforce ecosystem for Sales Performance Management?
Salesforce provides native sales planning functionality.
Sales planning systems need to work in lockstep with your business. Salesforce is already the system of record for territories and customer data. By adopting Sales Planning within Salesforce and connecting it with Enterprise Territory Management (ETM) and Maps products, companies can design and deploy territory changes and make quota adjustments all within Salesforce.
Using native sales planning tools within Salesforce allows customers to:
- Reduce manual processes, errors and accelerate territory design iterations.
- Ensure real-time sync between territory plans and customer ownership.
- Enable the business to use Salesforce as the single source of truth and data source for territory design and management
Salesforce SPIFF can drive everyday behavior change.
Incentives only work if reps can see them. Traditional incentive compensation systems often sit outside the rep’s workflow. Comp plans are designed to drive behavior. However, if reps can’t see what a deal is worth, the impact is lost. Salesforce SPIFF addresses this pain point by embedding commission insights directly into the opportunity page, showing reps exactly what each deal is worth without leaving their workflow.
Salesforce SPIFF can bring incentives to life every day, and drive the right behavior by:
- Embedding commission visibility directly into the opportunity record, no extra tabs, no context switching, no clunky integrations.
- Enabling reps to see potential earnings in real time.
- Reinforcing desired behaviors with immediate feedback.
Staying in Salesforce keeps data unified and cost of ownership low.
Maintaining the SPM systems should not be a burden. Operating within a single platform ensures consistency in data definitions, data architecture, workflows, and reporting. Using a single, reliable system for facilitating strategic decision making and for executing on everyday operations reduces technical debt and total cost of ownership (TCO).
By consolidating SPM within Salesforce through Sales Planning and SPIFF, organizations avoid:
- Costly integrations between disparate systems that will never be fully in sync
- Losing control over maintenance capabilities and the need for adjusting downstream systems for every change
- Licensing fees for external platforms and data integrations
Achieve more efficient SPM with Salesforce and Spaulding Ridge.
Sales performance management is a critical capability for modern sales organizations, and sales operations teams need to be agile to continuously adapt to changes in market conditions, product portfolio, organizational structure, and personnel.
At Spaulding Ridge one of our core values is efficient execution. Deploying our implementations right, the first time, is mission critical for our customers and for our business. We have built our ASPYR and ACHEVE frameworks based on 100+ SPM and ICM projects over our 8 years as a company to enable our customers to get SPM right.
By embracing best-in class planning approaches through frameworks like ASPYR and ACHEVE and leveraging native Salesforce tools such as Sales Planning and embedding incentives into daily workflows through SPIFF, companies can drive agility, reduce complexity, and improve sales outcomes.
Salesforce offers a unified platform for planning, execution, and behavior change, making it the ideal foundation for managing a high-performing sales organization. If you’re curious to see how we use Salesforce to drive better SPM performance for our clients, reach out.