Do you know which activities differentiate your top sales reps from your low performers, aside from revenue generation? Or what differentiates top performers in how they spend their days, what their average deal size is, and what top performers consider a waste of time?
As organizations face an increasingly competitive market with ever-shrinking margins, it’s imperative to be able to drill down into detailed data that gives you key insights to better hire, ramp, and coach sales professionals.
It’s not enough to benchmark against industry standards. You need quality data that enables you to benchmark your reps in your org based on their behavior.
When you benchmark, you give yourself a baseline of data specific to what’s actually going on in your org that allows you to measure initial performance and make smart decisions as to what to change. You can begin to separate high performers from low, and hone in on specific behavior patterns that help you improve reps’ performance, bookings, and efficiency.
Benchmarking uncovers actionable information, such as the type of activities, the average duration, and cadence throughout the year that separates high and low performers. It answers questions such as:
With People.ai Sales Rep Performance Benchmarking, you establish your criteria for “quality” with an internally used and normalized metric for rep performance, typically a form of attainment. Then, we use AI to determine which activities (by number, average duration, and cadence) truly differentiate performance in your sales org.
This data can be sliced by anything that is valuable to your org, especially when it comes to potentially different sales motions, including, but not limited to:
From these analyses, People.ai provides specific, actionable playbooks by phase, product, segment, industry, and region, enabling your sales enablement team to set dynamic goals to ensure all sales activities are high-value.
It’s not enough to count activity levels. The number of activities itself doesn’t drive performance, but rather it’s the TYPE of activities your reps do, and when they do them, that leads to success (or failure). People.ai has multiple ways to conduct benchmarking, with the simplest requiring access to email and calendar data.
Here’s an example of benchmarking results based on email and calendar data for a company in the commercial segment (but which was selling as if to enterprise customers):
Key insights you might glean from these results:
Based on data like this, you can coach reps to ensure they are doing the right activities, at the right time, with the right cadence, as well as discourage reps from spending too much time on less valuable activities.
You can use benchmarking data to hire better. Based on the above data, you might ask candidates how they prefer to engage with customers. Do they prefer to meet in person or by email? It should be noted that enterprises often do need in-person meetings, so this data can be used to make sure new hires are placed in the right roles and that their strengths are leveraged.
Benchmarking data enables you to customize your onboarding and ongoing enablement programs for maximum success. With clear numbers for 30, 60, and 90-day activity levels of top performers that ramp, you can coach new hires accordingly.
More data points and better data quality leads to better questions, insights, and decisions. People.ai benchmarking can deliver actionable insights across your entire go-to-market team using activity-based goal setting for success, ensuring you have an organization of Top Performers.
Learn more about what performance data like benchmarking can do for your team by scheduling a demo of People.ai.
