Is Your Team Speaking the Same Language?

Key Areas to Clarify Expectations and KPI’s to Ensure Alignment 

As a leader in your organization, you are responsible for ensuring that your sales team is productive and achieving results. A crucial step that is often overlooked is to clarify expectations and KPIs (key performance indicators) across the company. Everyone should be working toward common goals, and to do so, they need the same vocabulary. Here are six key areas to focus on when clarifying expectations, talking the lingo, and understanding your KPIs.

Company Goals  

Company buy-in is crucial to success. These goals should align with the entire team, and everyone needs to understand and believe in them. Be confident that your team understands these goals and how their individual work contributes to them.

Can your employees answer these…

What are the overall objectives the company is trying to achieve? What are the specific goals for the sales team? What am I doing daily to help? 

Individual Roles  

The next step is to clarify everyone’s role on the team. What are specific responsibilities? What is expected daily? By keeping these straightforward, you empower your team with the confidence and responsibility needed to perform their job well. More importantly, how are your team members seeing these roles executed daily? When your reps understand these roles, it improves the quality of customer interactions.

KPIs  

Once you have explained the company goals and individual roles, you can begin to identify KPIs for each team member. What metrics will you use to measure success? How will you know if someone is meeting or exceeding expectations? Does your CRM track these for you and update the employee on their status? By identifying KPIs upfront, you can avoid any surprises down the road. Examples of key sales metrics:

1. Prospecting

2. Opportunity Pursuit and Opportunity Creation
   1. What constitutes an opportunity? Is there a dollar threshold or other criteria required?
3. Business Development
4. Critical Selling events

First understand if there are several types of sales engagements, and how often these activities should occur to be successful. Then explain what should be recorded in CRM.

Our rule is always, “If it does not benefit you or me to read this tomorrow, then do not enter it today.”  What are your criteria for valuable data in CRM entry?

Having a visual for pipeline management can be extremely beneficial for your team and provides them with the infrastructure they need to be successful. Make sure your platform provides this level of engagement.

Involving your team in the pipeline confirms their knowledge of the steps between opportunity creation and revenue generation, and how long they should take.

Processes  

Without processes, sales employees follow their own path of bringing sales, leaving the company with only insights into the results. As a leader, you should be able to help guide your sales team to follow the most efficient steps to achieve success. Having a clear path and process tasks your team with what needs to be done and where they can go for help. Creating a process can provide an improved work experience for your sales team.

What steps need to be taken to complete a sale? What resources are available to help salespeople achieve their goals?

Training  

Providing training on any new systems or processes allows for fewer surprises and demonstrates dedication to your team. Training should also include an understanding of how the company talks. What keywords are they using, and how should they be inferred? Do not assume one company talks the same as the next.

Tracking Progress 

Finally, review those KPIs and goals. Then give feedback to individuals not achieving desired outcomes and to those who are. This feedback loop demonstrates if the team has a clear understanding of what is expected of them, and where they can improve. Tracking KPIs also provides management valuable feedback to determine if missed outcomes are specific to an individual, or a result of a larger issue with the entire team. If you can point to your CRM data that your employees use daily, it will drive them to work within your systems created and achieve expected results or understand where the missed opportunities lie.

The bottom line is that it is crucial for management to clarify expectations and KPIs across their sales teams. By doing so, they ensure that everyone is on the same page and working towards common goals. This will lead to a more productive and successful sales team overall. Your processes, resources, and platforms should all be working together.

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