Sales Performance Management: Ongoing Competency Measurement

However, the performance review shouldn’t be the only time Competency Metrics show up.  They should be tracked and reported on a more frequent basis, say monthly, via sales dashboards.  This is done so that a Sales Manager can use the ongoing measurement to coach Reps in Competencies they may need help with in real time rather than on an annual plan.

To do this, however, requires some work – here are 3 steps to get it working.  This assumes you’ve already gotten your Accountabilities and Competencies determined, and you’ve aligned your Competencies with your Accountabilities. 

1. Once you know what Competencies you want to track, you need to develop tasks for each Competency.  The task is something that, if completed, shows improvement in the Competency.  For example, if you want to track the sales technique of “Email Prospecting” as a competency, you would record the number of emails a Rep sent that were prospecting emails.  You’d probably also track the number of those emails that were replied to.

2. Determine how to track and report on the tasks.  In the above example, if you were using SalesForce.com and had it integrated with Outlook, you could set up tracking of emails out and in.  Then, you could add this ‘activity’ reporting to a dashboard for the Rep and Sales Manager to see.  You could even go so far as to set thresholds and color codes for attaining or not attaining the levels set for a specfic role.

3.  Validate the quantitative data in the dashboard with subjective data obtained through field rides, 1 on 1 meetings, and 360-degree assessment information.  This validation is done on an annual basis anyway (assuming annual performance reviews), so just do it in smaller chunks along the way and it will make the annual subjective assessment that much easier (and real). 

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