Performance Management

Does this sound familiar?

Revenue per person is known down to the euro. But why one salesperson sells twice as much as another, with a comparable portfolio, nobody can really say. So the conversation is about the target, not about what someone could do differently.

• Performance reviews look back at numbers, not forward at behaviour and skills.
• Sales managers spend their time on forecasts and escalations, and hardly any on coaching.
• There are plenty of dashboards, but little changes because of them.
• There is more debate about the fairness of portfolios and targets than about customers.
• The middle of the team gets the least attention, while that is where most growth lies.
• For years, management relied on gut feeling and personal relationships. As the company grows, that no longer works.
• The shareholder asks for predictable growth and clear KPIs, but the pipeline is hard to forecast.
• The HR cycle was designed for the whole organisation and fits poorly with the rhythm of sales.

This is rarely a lack of data. What is usually missing is a shared definition of success, and the ability of managers to use that data for the right conversation.

Our approach

We work in five steps, starting from your own CRM and revenue data. Depending on your question, we run a compact analysis of a few days or guide the full project.

1. Quantitative analysis

We map performance per salesperson, month by month: revenue, new business, deal value, conversion per funnel stage and cycle time. We correct for the potential of the portfolio or region, so you compare like with like.

2. Performance segmentation

We distinguish top performers, the core and laggards, and show exactly where the differences arise. Does one person get more meetings, or does another convert them better? Is it about volume, deal size or choice of customers?

3. The drivers of performance

We look for causes at four interacting levels: the salesperson, the manager, the systems around them and the organisation as a whole. This keeps you from holding an individual accountable for what is really a problem in the process, the division of roles or the way the team is led.

4. Develop rather than judge

Performance management only works when it makes people better. For each salesperson we translate the analysis into concrete development points, and we help managers turn these into a steady rhythm of coaching and feedback. It is the same Development Driven thinking we use to recruit commercial leaders: talent grows where ambition and role are aligned.

5. Embedding

We help choose a small set of KPIs that makes both results and behaviour visible, and set up the review cycle and reporting around it. After one or two periods we review together what it has delivered.

Why this approach works

What explains sales performance has been studied for decades in the leading international management and marketing journals. The conclusions are remarkably consistent, and they guide our approach:

• Role clarity and skills matter most. Knowing what is expected of you, and having the knowledge and adaptability to deliver it, predicts performance more strongly than personality or motivation alone. That is where good performance management starts.
• Managing outcomes and managing behaviour do different things. Steering on outcomes alone brings short-term focus and more pressure. Also steering on behaviour and skills brings more customer orientation, more commitment and better long-term results. The right mix depends on the role.
• Learning goals alongside performance goals. Specific, challenging goals raise performance. But in complex selling, salespeople focused on learning work smarter and adapt better to the customer than those who only watch the target.
• The manager makes the difference. The direct manager has a large influence on performance, and the greatest with less experienced salespeople and the broad core of the team. Coaching is therefore not an extra, but the heart of the role.
• Colleagues learn from each other. Performance spreads through a team. How a team is composed and whether knowledge is shared affects everyone's results, not just those of the top performers.
• Fairness determines whether it works. An evaluation that feels arbitrary costs effort and good people. Transparent criteria and comparable starting positions are a precondition, not a detail.

Bart Dietz, founder of SalesQuarters, is affiliated with Rotterdam School of Management and translates these insights to the reality of your organisation.