And so do you. How hard and how much? Good questions and you, or the appropriate person in your company, have a chance to answer them right now.  Take CSO Insights' 2010 Sales Compensation & Performance Management, which we just opened this week (official launch will be next week). This is our 3rd annual comp survey and promises to be our biggest yet--we had over 1,000 firms respond to last year's survey.

What did we learn last year? 6 of 10 firms used accelerators in their compensation design but less than 1 rep in 4 reps reached accelerators in 70% of firms reporting. And the top metrics being compensated were new accounts and quota achievement. This probably isn't surprising but it's limiting. There are other important metrics to consider such as contribution to margin or its inverse, limited discounting.

Consistent use of the CRM system and/or adopted...

This week I attended Selling Power's Sales Leadership Conference in Las Vegas and had a chance to meet a lot of CSOs in person and hear some terrific presentations.  Gerhard Gschwandtner (who may already have become one of those people known only by his first name) started his presentation with an exercise.  Asking everyone to stand and cover their eyes with their left hand, he then asked attendees to point with their right hand in the direction they thought was north.  [Note:  This is not the finger pointing of the title.]

If you guessed that people were pointing in every direction, you're right. And Gerhard's analogy was that in today's rapidly changing and massively changed business climate, no one really knows where we're heading.  But in this analog, growth and customer intimacy drive value.  And "value" here as defined by the buyer/customer is True North.  (...

Last week's blog introduced the SRP Matrix and defined its two axes:  levels of sales process implementation and levels of relationship.  With this foundation in place, this week we look at what the relative performance is of various matrix tiers.  The past three years we've segmented the matrix based on data gathered in our SPO survey.  The metrics we used to do this were:  percentage of annual revenue plan attained; percentage of reps meeting/beating quota; sales rep turnover; and forecast accuracy (won/lost/no decision).

Based upon the survey data, the various matrix cells fell into three performance levels (see Figure 1).

It's worth noting that two cells represent what we call "no fly" zones:  Random Process-Trusted Partner and Dynamic Process-Approved Vendor.  Although individual reps may be...

I recently participated in a webinar addressing the question: Does Access to Timely/Accurate Metrics Make a Difference in Performance?  The short answer: you betcha!

Percentage of overall revenue attained was 7.5 points higher (78.3% vs. 85.8%) and percentage of reps meeting/beating quota was 6.5 points better (52% vs. 58.5%).  But as noted in my comments during that session (register to listen to recorded webinar at Birst) and in a soon to be released white paper, these are lagging indicators.  That is, by the time you know what these numbers are, they're history.  And you may be too if they're bad enough.

As long as you're tracking historical figures, you are by definition playing catch-up.  If all you have are race results, you never have a chance to impact the outcome of the race.  You are forever behind.

How to get ahead?

In our Sales...