Teams that intentionally track performance measures and leading indicators also tend to reach their goals faster and more consistently, especially those who study the data and communicate expectations to their teams.
While I have seen teams track this data in many ways, a CRM is a critical component to effectively tracking sales performance. Without it, sales leaders often make educated guesses about how their sales team is performing.
If that’s you, you owe it to yourself and your organization to use one of the dozens of good CRMs that work best for your organization.
Why a CRM Is Necessary to Measure Sales Performance
By its very nature, measuring sales performance entails gathering data about leads from multiple sources and tracking how each seller moves those leads through the sales process.
The goal is to put that information into measurable, quantifiable, and actionable information that can be easily accessed and shared. Regardless of how much data is collected on the accounts salespeople work or the financials related to your pipeline, without having a way to organize, track, and calculate your sales metrics, all is for naught.
Having a CRM allows you to quickly do many things, including tracking the accounts your sales team is working on, upstream activities, calculating complex metrics, and adding information to custom dashboards and management —all things that are difficult, time-consuming, or impossible without one.
Measuring Sales Performance with CRM
As organizations become more complex, measuring sales performance isn’t easy. You’ll need to track the performance of multiple salespeople, report different information to varying parts of the organization, and measure the overall performance of your sales team.
Without a functioning CRM, all of this information is left to spreadsheets or different systems that don’t communicate with each other or have been abandoned by the sales team long ago.
At this point, it is important to note that to measure sales performance with a CRM, 100% of your salespeople must use it, and their accounts and contacts must be regularly updated in the CRM.
Simply put, if your sales team isn’t using the CRM and entering information, you can’t achieve what you would like to measure sales performance.
However, the company isn't the only one that benefits from salespeople keeping their contacts in CRM—salespeople also gain the ability to track and see every touch with the contacts.
Please Get Rid of Your Spreadsheets
While many sales leaders can write macros and use pivot tables, VlookUps, and more, I wouldn’t recommend advanced Excel skills as a solution for tracking your sales funnel and measuring sales performance.
Sales managers and companies that haven’t invested in CRMs and are still relying on spreadsheets have a tough time measuring anything except the frustration they encounter when needing to manually update their spreadsheet and try to make heads or tails of how their sales team is performing.
Say “No” to spreadsheets for measuring sales performance and " Yes” to learning about how to measure sales performance with a CRM.
*Editor's Note: This blog has been updated since its original post date.
