Discover how Xactly Incent facilitates sales manager success by providing sales performance transparency as a part of a sales performance management (SPM) platform.
Do you know exactly where each of your sales representatives stands right now, in terms of attaining their sales goals? Do you know what is driving each team members’ success? Knowing this information helps you make the best decisions possible—about personnel, products, and strategy. To maximize your company’s performance, you need a 360-degree view into all aspects of your sales team’s performance, including their goals, attainment levels, and underlying drivers of performance. And even more importantly, in order to see sales manager success, your team needs real-time access to this data.
If you don’t currently have these views immediately available, it’s time to move to a real-time and transparent process that will help your team reach its sales goals as well as facilitate a data-driven discussion on maximizing performance. When you use a sales performance management (SPM) platform, all of the critical sales data, performance results, and bonuses are automatically tracked and calculated for you.
This gives sales managers the tools they need to have results-oriented, data-driven conversations with their sales team. In fact, this ongoing dialog is how leading sales teams reinforce the objectives outlined by the organization’s Sales Incentive Plans.
In addition to meeting and exceeding goals, creating transparency shifts your organizational culture to one of accountability and collaboration—which allows you to increase your trust in your team. Because you know where everyone stands, you can make timely adjustments to match the sales strategy.
How Sales Managers are Using Xactly Incent for Better Sales Performance Management
Xactly used its extensive sales management experience to design and build a tool that facilitates sales performance management efforts.
Xactly Incent allows you to align your planning and analysis efforts across your entire organization which encourages more collaborative and data-driven planning. The benefits also include:
- Improved Planning: By managing the creation and tracking of sales incentive plans, Xactly Incent improves direct communication concerning plan-related information between management and the sales representative. The workflow management feature ensures that both the manager and representative review and approve the plan. Because the plan document is stored in the cloud, managers and representatives can access the documents at any time, from anywhere.
- Real-time Performance: You can schedule data runs from SFDC to Xactly to ensure real-time data is always available. This allows field representatives to review their results and let managers know if any information is incorrect. By tracking data in real-time, the team can project their future earnings for both the entire team and their own results.
- Customized Reporting: Every organization needs different details and metrics to make decisions and increase success. You can create the reports you need to view real-time performance, such as ranking reports and pod performance. Using analytics reports, you can view meaningful insights using custom logic instead of raw sales data. Because of that, you can now quickly make directional plan adjustments based on actual data instead of assumptions.
- Improved Insights: This immensely powerful benchmarking tool helps you align your compensation program with market expectations. Sales managers can now stay one step ahead of the competition by knowing benchmarking metrics.
Long story short: yes, you need a relationship with your direct reports that is based on collaboration and trust. But you need to start with clear and reliable numbers and data insights. You can then use this information to start a meaningful and honest conversation. By understanding where your team stands and their forecasted sales, you can fine tune your sales plan to provide the most support, coaching, and motivation needed for sales manager success and maximize performance. The result? Your direct reports maximizing their sales performance, improving their overall engagement, and increasing their job satisfaction.
Want to learn more about how Xactly Incent is helping companies transform their incentive compensation? Check out DocuSign’s story here.
About Intangent
Intangent is a sales performance management consultancy. We work with sales organizations to plan, implement, and manage their sales performance technology solutions. Our commitment to customer success has led to hundreds of successful incentive compensation, territory management and quota planning deployments. Intangent is a privately owned company established in 2005 and headquartered in Toronto.
Ready to learn more about how Xactly’s performance transparency can help you? Discover everything Xactly Incent has to offer.
