Why sales performance benchmarks matter

In the world of sales, where success is quantified by numbers, performance benchmarks stand as the endzones guiding teams toward their goals. Benchmarks are not just numbers on a dashboard; they are the scoreboard to determine who wins.

When I was getting started as a sales manager, I struggled to get my ragtag posse of a sales team to do what I wanted. I was frustrated trying to get them to do all the things that would help them sell more.

One of my mentors suggested I put up a white board somewhere that was in a high-traffic area in the office. He said put all the sales reps’ names on it and what the goal was and track each rep’s progress daily.

The sales reps hated it, but it worked. They could not stand to have a zero for long in the month, so they fought hard to have some orders early each month. My role as a sales manager became easier. I had to do less pushing, as they now were pushing themselves to make the quota every month as soon as possible and avoid and good-natured needling from their colleagues.

So how many goals should be set? This is both important and a little surprising. Most orgs would do well to have one goal only. In our case it was revenue per month. We knew if we could get the reps to make that quota, our company would do well over time. The other details did not make that much difference.

The temptation once we start setting goals for sales is to start adding more goals to support special parts of the business. Don’t do it. Figure out the one thing that — if done consistently — will make you successful.

When Facebook was growing early on, the only metric Mark Zuckerberg talked about was the number of active users. His thought was if they got a billion active users, everything else in the business would do fine. Good thinking.