Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

5 steps to fast-tracking your career move to upper management

I read a very good article today on career development strategies, written by Kriengsak Niratpattanasai, a management consultant who writes periodically in the Bangkok Post. While his article is geared to people already managing, I'd like to take a more basic approach, and suggest that if you're a Business Development or Telesales rep right now, I think it's a very good idea to look at your career in its current state, and design a plan for your next career step.

A good number of inside sales reps fail to do this, primarily, i think, because many of us landed in this profession by accident. Inside sales was just something we'd do to bridge the gap to our next real job. And now, 5 years later, we're making real good money, have exciting conversations with prospects, and know an awful lot about business in general. But we're still not thinking career, when perhaps we should be.

Consider a model that could work like this. Say you're fresh out of college, and six months into your role as a BusDev rep. There isn't any reason that you shouldn't set your sights on eventually managing your (or another) BusDev team. By working hard and smart, you could easily be there in 5 years. As an Inside Sales Manager, you could set your sights for a director position in 5 years. Complete the model until you project yourself to be a VP.  The model suggests that if you work hard, continually exceed quota, develop your career and business skills, you could be a VP 15 years from leaving college. If you started the whole process at 25, you'd be a VP at 40.

If this sounds crazily aggressive to you, consider the fact that over 150 people I originally trained as reps are now in management. This didn't happen by accident. So I'm going to give you some steps to execute that can get you started:

1) Determine what job function you want to have in 5 years. List your 10 and 15 year plans, too.

2) Conduct a critical self-analysis on your current skill set. The questions you should ask are:
   - Are my current skills adequate to perform my current job at optimum proficiency?
     - What skills will I have to improve or obtain to exceed at the management job I'd like to have in 5 years?

3) Once you have a list, meet with your own manager to discuss your "5 year plan." Ask him or her for a brutal assessment of where your skill set is today, and where it needs to be to move to the next level.

4) Armed with those two improvement lists, start a plan to make immediate improvements. If those include additional training your company won't pay for, figure out a way to acquire those skills through other means. Books and Toastmasters come immediately to mind as two possibilities.

5) Keep your manager in the loop, by meeting occasionally to discuss the progress you're making, and to get additional feedback. Remember that your own manager is on an upward career curve, too. These discussions will be great for both of you.

So there's your 5 point plan for becoming a VP in 15 years. You don't have to be 24 years old, either. As far as I'm concerned, you should start this process at any age. Chances are you won't be doing this all at one company either. If you've taken all the right steps, you very well may be interviewing at another company eventually for that high-level position.

One of the great things about living in tough economic times is that you're forced to really think about what matters in your career. So the challenge I'm throwing down is this: think proactively, not reactively, about where you're headed, and start taking some notes today about where you really need to improve to get to the next level. You won't be alone, as all successful people beat themselves up over something they could have done better yesterday, then figure out fast how they'll do it better next time. So add a process for fast-tracking your career to your Best Practices playbook.

Use KPIs during your telesales job interview to put yourself above competitive candidates.

We don't just create and deliver world-class telesales training courses here. We also help great telesales reps who've excelled in our classes and at work to find jobs. We know reps that have never been under quota that were laid off this year. The other day, veteran inside sales executive Alicia Assefa interviewed a candidate we sent her, and she gave the candidate some outstanding advice on how to make a presentation in the interview that would be compelling to any sales executive. It's all about describing how you use KPI (key performance indicators) to increase your numbers and overshoot quota. I asked Alicia to share her perspective with my blog, and she did. I'll let her put it in her own worlds. Here's what Alicia says:

Everyone knows how difficult it is to find work.  It's tough out there.  Although job opportunities are more prevalent than they were say, six months ago, it is still a very competitive market.   A few months ago, you could expect hundreds of applicants for one open position.  Now, the number may be in the tens of applicants.  In any case, the odds are still against job seekers.  In order to get noticed, your resume must stand out.   To get to the next level of the interview process, you must stand out, during each interview.

If you are looking for a sales position, there is a sure fire way to stand out from the crowd and position yourself as the "right "person for the job.  Know your numbers. 

Your numbers are metrics that Sales Managers call Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.   A manager's performance rating is, in most cases, tied to KPIs such as pipeline growth and quota achievement. 

What are the KPIs for an Inside Sales Professional?   KPIs will vary, based on whether you do Teleprospecting or have a sales quota. 

KPIs for Teleprospecting Reps: If you are a Teleprospecting Representative and your primary focus is on generating leads for a Field or Inside Sales team, your KPIs might include the following:

• Average Daily Dials: You should know, on average, the number of dials you make, each day. If the product is a high ticket complex solution that requires that you speak to a Senior IT professional, you may make 40-50 dials per day, as you must get past gate keepers, etc., to reach the required high-level IT professional. If, however, your product is a lower-priced commoditized solution, you may be able to make 60-100 dials per day.
• Raw Lead (RL) to Qualified Lead (QL) Conversion: Raw leads are the leads that marketing provides you, each day. Depending on the type of solution and contact level you need to reach, your RL to QL conversion should be in the range of 15%-20%. If you have a position, currently, check out the RL-to-QL conversion statistics for your team, for a 2 week period. See what the average is and where you rank. If you are looking for work and don't know this particular KPI, try to remember the total number of leads you received and how many of those turned to a qualified lead.
• Cold Call Ratio: Cold calls are calls that you make to contacts that you uncover without the aid of marketing support. Sales Managers are, typically, very interested in Sales Representatives who are not afraid to make cold calls. In general 20% of your dials should be cold calls into your accounts or territory. Managers will want to know where you got the contact names and how you pitched your Company's value proposition.
• Contact Ratios: Dials and lead conversion are interesting to Sales Managers because Sales is a numbers game. The more dials you make and the more leads you qualify, the greater your chances are of successfully meeting sales targets. A very important KPI is the contact ratio number. For example, if your daily dial average is 50, you should expect to connect with a minimum of 5 important contacts, or 10% of your dials. Ten to fifteen percent of your dials should be with important contacts that can help you move your sales activity to the next levels.
• Pipeline Growth: Pipeline is not just for quota bearing reps. Teleprospecting Reps, who generate leads for a Sales team, will have a pipeline of Qualified Leads (QL). Know the Average Sales Price (ASP) of your solution. Know your team's quota. Once you have this information, you can start to build your qualified leads pipeline. Typically 33 percent of deals will roll off the sales forecast, 33 percent will close and 33 percent will stall. If you are supporting a Sales Team, in general, you will need a qualified leads pipeline of 3X your teams' quota targets.
• Emails: Emails are another touch point that connects you to prospects. Although the phone is the primary way to connect with prospects, it is often necessary to stay in touch through an email. Know how many emails you send out, daily. Emails, when added to your average daily dials, increases the total number of prospect touches you have, each day. On average you should send out 15-20 emails to key contacts, daily.

KPIs for TeleSales Reps: If you are a quota bearing Sales Professional, your KPIs will include most of the items above, including:

• Average Daily Dials
• Cold Call Ratio
• Contact Ratios
• Average Sales Price
• Emails

In addition, as a quota bearing representative, you have a quota (monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, etc.).  In order to achieve your quota, it is important to build your pipeline to ensure that you will meet sales targets. 

• Pipeline Growth: Depending on the type of solution you are selling (complex, high-priced or commoditized, low-priced) you will need to build a pipeline of 3X to 6X your revenue objective. If you are currently working in a sales position, ask your manager how large your pipeline should be to meet sales targets. Start building to that level, to ensure your success.
• Quota Achievement: Every Sales Manager is going ask you if you made your sales targets. If you did, you should know how (pipeline growth of X times of Sales Targets, X Cold Calls made per day, 50-60 Daily Dials, etc.). If you didn't, you should know why. If you didn't, make your numbers, were you within 85+ % (an acceptable range). If you didn't, how did you rank against your peers?

After you've derived your numbers: Now that you know your numbers, the next step is to ensure that your résumé lists your numbers (KPIs).  List your achievements, by company.  For example you might list:

• At ABC Company I achieved 92% of my quarterly objectives for 6 consecutive quarters. I was ranked number 2 amongst my peer group. I achieved my numbers based on:
• 1) Average Daily Dials: 65
• 2) Cold Call Ratio: 20% of all dials
• 3) Pipeline: 2.5X quarterly sales objective
• 4) Contact Ratio: 20% of my daily contacts were with senior level IT Executives

Once your resume is completed and lists your KPIs, your next and final step is to complete a one-page overview of your accomplishments.  This overview should list your major accomplishments, with the most important accomplishment listed at the top. 

Your overview should list the following:

Sales Highlights and Accomplishments

Company XYZ:

• 2009 Presidents Club
• Achieved 120% of Quota
• Pipeline 5X revenue objective
• ASP: $50,000
• Contact Ratio: 20%
• Cold Call Ratio: 15%

When you have an onsite interview, make sure that you give your Sales Highlights and Accomplishments document to the hiring manager.  Keep a copy in front of you, for the entire interview.  You have a lot of numbers to discuss and you don't want to forget your most important KPIs.

Knowing your numbers and communicating your numbers, during the interview process, will put you way ahead of the competition.  When you know your numbers, Sales Managers will feel very comfortable that they won't be hiring a junior person.  Rather, they will see you as a seasoned and serious Sales Professional who is goal oriented and highly motivated.  Start building your list of KPIs.  Know your numbers and communicate them in your resume, Sales Highlights and Accomplishments overview and during the interview process.

It's Geoff here again. So there's some important advice from an inside sales executive whose job entails determining who to hire and who to discard. One day while I was a juror, a judge told me after the case was finished that he was frustrated because he'd told the prosecutor exactly how he wanted the case presented, and the prosecutor went and did it his own way anyway. And lost the case. Here, we have an inside sales exec who's telling you how to get hired. Add Alicia Assefa's advice on presenting your KPIs to your Best Practices Playbook.

Top 5 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2009

Last week I provided 5 great tips for closing year-end business, from a list of my own favorite blog posts. But you voted on yours, too, and that's what today's post is about.

When I launched this blog in 2008, I did it with two objectives in mind. For one, I wanted to convey valuable elements of my telesales training curriculum to my subscribers, a good number of whom work for companies that would love to hire us to train their inside sales teams, but can't find the budget to do it in these tough times. My other objective was to help to elevate ethics and best practices within the high tech inside sales business, posts that are pertinent to sales management as well as sales reps. Particularly in the latter category, I've ruffled a few feathers, but that gets dialogue going and brings issues up that frankly need to be addressed in order for our industry to continue evolving. The blog's successful. It's been picked up on a bunch of other websites, and loads of people are using the material (even my competitors!)

Reflecting on 2009, I thought it would be of value to tell you what your colleagues were prioritizing when they read the posts that were written in 2009. Here are the top five, in order of page views. If you haven't read them in awhile, why not pick out the ones you feel might help you get a great start to the new year? Numbers 3 and 5 deal specifically with  Management issues, while #s 1, 2, and 4 reflect techniques that can increase sales, starting this week:

1. 20 Characteristics of a Superior Inside Salesperson
2. 5 Most Common Price Negotiation Mistakes
3. Increase sales through improved Daily Call Metrics
4. 4 Common weak phrases that erode telesales success
5. Increase sales by conducting an effective Telesales Employee Performance Appraisal

I'll keep blogging on techniques and issues I feel are critical as the new year unfolds. These are wonderful, exciting times to be in Inside Sales, and each new leap in the technologies we use presents new opportunities and challenges. Believe me, I'll write about them. I hope you'll add the techniques in the posts above to your Best Practices Playbook... and let's get started having a great year!

What makes a great Inside Sales Manager? Ask Pete Tarbox!

This week, I've had a significant amount of commentary on a number of posts I've written on what makes a superior sales manager. There's been a bunch of traffic on my posts entitled 5 Great Sales Demotivators: Decrease sales by following these practices, and Increase sales by conducting an effective Telesales Employee Performance Appraisal, among others. Earlier this week, Pete Tarbox weighed in on what he feels are traits that are critical in being a successful inside sales manager. Pete's been around long enough to have seen a lot, and I profiled his techniques for selling to the Defense Department in my 5 Critical Tactics when Selling to the Defense Department post.

I like Pete's approach to management excellence so much that I'm producing it verbatim here. What do you think?

Traits of an excellent sales manager:

1. Like a great rep, a great manager listens and asks probing questions before taking action. This is crucial when diagnosing a sales situation.
2. Comes across as truly wanting to help their reps (instead of beat them up). I've encountered a number of VP's who will react in a negative, emotional way before (or without) making sure that they really understand what's going on.
3. Helps their people to build skills by teaching in detail (or getting someone who can, like you) what needs to be done, as opposed to only saying what needs to be done (such as "you need to talk to executives").
4.  In my experience, people who have actually done the job at their company - or are willing to learn in detail what it really takes -  make the best sales managers. I once had a new VP come in and learn NOTHING about our product or market. He thought that he could increase sales by teaching new sales techniques (he never learned what the real problem was, nor did he understand our market). That's an extreme case, but I frequently see VPs hired that come from other markets - and then come in and show a lot of aggression to their sales force. People who are promoted from within are able to better empathize with their reps and translate winning skills.
5.  Do not overload their reps with non-value-add tasks. Forecasting, reporting, tracking all serve a purpose and must be done - but that needs to be balanced with actual selling.
6.  The best also understand how to carve up territories in ways that make sense for their people (provide enough opportunity without providing too much busy work), i.e. when you have 12 multi-divisional accounts and are asked to generate a "quick" overview for a meeting tomorrow... or all of a sudden find yourself in the middle of 5 enterprise upgrades (which may not represent current revenue opportunity but must be successful in order to keep your customers and have future opportunity).
7. Helps to insulate their people from constant change (this is a tough one because things are constantly changing, but it's demotivating to work a bunch of accounts that then get handed out to other people, or to start and stop on an account, and so on).
8. And like all managers - makes it fun to work for them, communicates to their workers the linkage between their activities and the big picture, communicates corporate objectives.

(Geoff here again) Thanks for your perspective, Pete. Managing is never easy, especially when times are tough. In my experience, managers never get enough time sharing best management practices and discussing areas of challenge with one another. But a number of inside sales managers read this blog, and we have some very good posts that managers can read by clicking on the Management Techniques link on the left side of this page. Our telesales management classes are always popular, too.

Pete's thoughts provide some great food for thought, and represent timely discussion points for sales reps and managers alike. Why not add them to your Best Practices Playbook?

5 Personality Traits of a Superior Inside Sales Person

The most popular blog article I've ever written is 20 Characteristics of a Superior Inside Salesperson. In that post, I primarily covered activities and behaviors that most successful inside sales people have, relating to prospect/customer interaction, and interaction with the people with whom they work.  What I didn't address were the personality traits of a superior salesperson.

When I'm asked what personality characteristics make a good telesales person, I'm always a little leery of spilling the beans. There are companies that make a lot of money "testing" job hunters to see if they have what it takes to be a salesperson, and I think any kind of personality testing is balderdash, because of the thousands of people who've gone through my telesales training courses, loads of them broke a whole lot of rules. They would have "tested" right out the door and never gotten hired in the first place.

Nevertheless, I've noticed five personality characteristics common to many of the successful reps with whom I've worked. Warning: you may not want to live next door to these people, marry them, or discuss world politics with them. You want them on your sales team, though.

So here they are. A great sales person:

1) Is Arrogant: believing he or she is every bit as smart as any CEO in the world, and smarter than most, including the CEO of his or her own company. That's why these reps are so good at calling high. That arrogance can occasionally annoy others in the workplace, but helps the superior rep to get through the tough days when the orders aren't coming in. When something isn't working, he or she will just get creative, then go out and figure out an alternative strategy that will.

2) Is Impatient: and doesn't like anything, or anybody, getting in the way of sales. Occasionally he or she will piss off co-workers and people at prospect companies that stand in the way of him or her getting to the right person on the decision team. This individual will moan and crab at co-workers that don't pass along leads fast enough, and can be an absolute nightmare to Marketing folks and IT people. CRM not working at optimum level? Your top salesperson may be the key complainer.

3) Is Messianic: he or she is absolutely driven to improve the work lives of his or her customers. That's why sometimes the rep crosses the line by continually bugging prospects about new ideas and ways to improve the prospect's bottom line. This rep may actually go to the lengths of telling the prospect that he or she is stupid for not "getting it."

4) Is Righteously Indignant: he or she will act as an advocate for customers when they have a legitimate beef with his or her company. I've seen top salespeople demand that their companies refund customers' money and take back the product months after installation if the product didn't work to spec. When the rep is successful, his or her company loses money in the short term, but gains a reputation for honesty that money can't buy.

5) Is Greedy: in enterprise selling, he or she isn't satisfied with just one product placement; he or she wants to sell every opportunity in the enterprise, all over the world, if possible. That salesperson wants tons of great leads, too, and will work them all really fast in order to get a better paycheck. This may very well cause occasional territory conflict within a sales organization. As a manager, you won't have to guess who the greedy one is: all the other reps will tell you.

Each one of these 5 personality traits has a real potential for offending someone. In my classes, I say that it's better to occasionally err on the side of aggressiveness, and when you do, you'll occasionally really annoy someone on the other end of the phone. But if you don't, you'll never know if you've stretched the envelope enough. I think annoying somebody on the phone once a year is about right, because then you'll know the limit. More than that, and you might have to scale it back a bit. The old line about it being better to ask forgiveness than permission goes a long way here.

If you're a really successful rep, I'll bet you management has called you on the carpet at least once for something related to one of the personality traits mentioned above. You may have even been nailed on them during performance reviews. I always end my blog posts with a note to apply what I've written to your own Best Practices Playbook. But not today, because these personality traits are not Best Practices. They're not the worst, either. Great salespeople aren't always the best liked, but they are totally focused on making themselves money. And if they do it honestly and ethically, they, their companies, and their customers end up in the win column.

Inheriting a Sales team: Now what do I do?

Today's post comes from Bangkok, where I'm doing some sales consulting for Frank, who's just inherited a sales team that in the past has been effective, but now the numbers are dropping and the company is concerned. Frank was brought in to run Operations, and has a sales team where two reps are over-quota performers and the rest are functioning below par.

There are other important issues Frank needs to address, some of which are in the area of team communication. The team has never been formally trained, and there is no current training budget. The top performing rep refuses to share the reasons for his success with other members of the team. The result of these two issues is that there are no best practices to be shared because they have not been codified.

This post is potentially important to all of you. If you're a telesales rep, you may one day be promoted to managing a team of inside sales people, and I guarantee that you won't be moving into a "perfect" situation, because there are none. If you're currently in Management, you may be dropped into a situation where most of your inherited reps are functioning at a rudimentary level, and you'll either have to grow them or dismiss them. And in today's austere world, you may have no money to hire us to help solve your problem through one of our telesales training courses. So what are you going to do, and where do you start?

As I told Frank in our consulting session, two of the first things to look at are what makes his best reps successful, and how their behaviors can be factored into creating a meaningful set of key performance indicators for everyone else. Let's look into this further:

1) What behaviors constitute top performance? Frank's top rep constantly blows out his quota numbers, but won't share his best practices. So Frank's going to have to "go along" on sales calls to observe and log best sales practices. This means listening to calls or going out on joint sales calls (his reps are hybrids, and work both on the phone and face-to-face). From this, Frank should begin to cobble together a list of best practices. He may not have to completely reinvent the wheel, because he can start with my 20 Characteristics of a Superior Sales Rep article, and build from there.

2) Which key performance indicators need to be exceeded for a rep to be constantly over quota? Frank's business is advertising sales for a publishing company. His top reps already know how many calls and appointments it typically takes to make a sale. And Frank already knows what the average sales price is. From this, he can derive a list of KPIs that will indicate how many calls a rep has to make each day to meet his or her monthly quota. The dilemma or course is that superior reps take fewer calls to meet quota, but Frank is starting from scratch. So Frank will have to build a different KPI list for every rep. He wants everyone to meet quota, but clearly, his junior-level reps are going to have to work either harder or smarter to get the job done. After reading my blog article on How to build better KPIs, Frank will be on his way to deriving his own KPIs.

In a perfect world, Frank would have inherited a sales team with already meaningful KPIs established, and all his team members would be in agreement as to what behaviors make them successful salespeople within the context of what they're selling. Obviously, this is what superior sales training does, but he's walked into a situation in which "hire and fire" is the norm, and sales training is seen as an unnecessary expense. He's trying to change that. Eventually, we may be able to come in and train his team. Until we do, I've given him some valuable ideas on what he can do in the meantime to increase sales performance. I imagine many of you reading this post have a similar dilemma, and many of the rest of you will too, eventually. Many sales managers are brought in to solve a problem: there are no "cushy" sales management jobs. Sometimes the hardest part of solving any problem is knowing exactly where to start. If you're not facing this dilemma today, print out this post and add it to your Best Management playbook. You'll probably be faced with a similar problem sometime in your future. As your sales management career evolves, so will the size of the issues with which you'll be dealing. And that's why you're getting paid the big bucks, right?

How should a telesales person dress for work?

Every day I monitor my website to see what search terms people used to arrive at www.alextrain.com Today, someone searched on "how should a telesales person dress for work".  I've never addressed the issue, but this comes up sooner or later in virtually every telesales department. So here's my answer, with an important caveat (see below):

A telesales person could dress in a clown suit or be nude (some at-home workers do this, I'll bet), and as long as he or she is a producer, it doesn't matter. One of the perks of working in inside sales is that you don't have to "dress for success," like you would if you were in outside sales. There is no extant data of which I'm aware that links professional dress with telesales success, so if you're an inside sales manager, I'd give a lot of leeway to how your inside folks dress, and prioritize productivity challenges instead. One of the best telesales people I ever worked with was John Dee, and I don't believe I ever saw John wear anything but shorts to work. John's management was smart enough to recognize that John was an all-star, and John responded by making great numbers and treating his customers really well. So there's an example from the real world in terms of how little dress really means to telesales success.

Now here's the caveat: if you're an inside salesperson, and you have a goal of eventually getting into management, you will have to dress for success, from day one. A good rule of thumb is to dress like your executives dress, whether it's business casual or in suits. It's an unwritten rule that execs always notice the good dressers in the work force, and if you dress well, you will be noticed. And when it comes to getting promoted, superior dress habits are definitely factored in, although not always explicitly discussed. So if you're a telesales rep that's on a mission to run your own department someday, please consider investing in a professional wardrobe if you haven't already. It's never too late to start dressing professionally, so if you don't, and want to get considered in the eventual management picture, why not start tomorrow?

The subject of dress rarely comes up in my telesales courses, although once, as we were returning from a break, the class was engaged in a spirited discussion of naked telemarketing from home. I put the kibosh on it, returned to the curriculum, and suggested the class take up the subject in off-hours. I've got a lot in my telesales curriculum, but nothing on that!

So bottom-line, dress any way you want as long as you're making your numbers, but do keep an eye to professional dress if a promotion to management is something you see in your horizon.

Increase sales by conducting an effective Telesales Employee Performance Appraisal

Periodically conducting an employee performance appraisal and overall performance reviews are essential to judging the effectiveness of individual inside sales reps. Discussions on this topic with managers when we're conducting our telesales training classes are frequent.  Your reps do need to know what your criteria are, and also need to know that they're fairly and evenly applied to everyone. If you're a manager that already has codified a performance appraisal and review process, read on, to ensure your criteria are valid and measurable, and based on observation, not opinion. If you're a manager that doesn't yet conduct appraisals and reviews, read ahead for a few ideas to get you started. And if you're a telesales rep, read on to ensure that your performance reviews are fair, valid, and are designed to help you to meet sales quota.

As a manager, when compiling behaviors for your performance review, keep in mind that these factors must be both measurable and observable.  Observations are the opposite of opinions. Every manager has opinions, but to be statistically valid, they must be backed up by measurable observations and behaviors that can be documented. By "observable", it means that you, not someone else, has witnessed the behaviors.

The ideal performance review should be based on the most important, measurable  factors that lead to success. For measurement, keep it simple. You might consider using a three-point scale detailing whether the rep exceeded, met, or didn't meet the objectives.  A larger scale, say 10 points, often opens the review to subjectivity, and the review must be objective. The argument can be made that one could, in fact quantify 10 success points for each performance factor, but does anyone really have enough time in the day to compile these?

How often should you give your reps a performance review? At least once a month. A good time to do it is when you hand each of them their monthly commission checks.  Do it in a series of one-on-one meetings. For individuals that are not meeting expectations, you may want to consider a weekly performance review to get their skillsets up to speed faster.

If you haven't yet listed your performance review elements, it's not a bad idea to generate your own list, then run it by your reps to ensure they're in agreement. They may have valid points, or give you ideas on other behaviors that you hadn't thought of. But do keep your reps on track, and reaffirm to them that the behaviors must be observable and measurable. And bear in mind that for every item on your list, your reps will, in their own performance reviews with you, expect you to provide a concrete example of how they exceeded, met, or underachieved, still another reason to underscore the importance that the behaviors be both observable and measurable.

To begin your list, try to break down the behaviors you want to track in three general areas:

• Job responsibilities
• Performance objectives needed to meet quota
• Performance objectives in support of team and company goals

Now let's review the points model:

• Level 3: Exceeded expectations
• Level 2: Met expectations
• Level 1: Did not meet expectations

Ready to start? Here are a few measurable behaviors that you may want to consider putting on your list, as well as some that are non-measurable that you'll want to stay away from. These lists are incomplete, and you'll certainly want to customize your own:

Factors that are measurable:

Job responsibilities

• Meets monthly quota
• Works business hours relating to territory (exceeds expectations when work hours occasionally extend to longer-than-8 hour days)
• Adheres to company-specified dress requirements (if work dress is specified as "business casual," a rep may exceed expectations by habitually wearing a suit, for example)

Performance objectives needed to meet quota

• Talked to at least one high-level executive at each of his or her 20 key accounts, and logged at least two sentences describing the conversation in the CRM to prove it
• Profiled the decision process from CXO through Managers, for each line of business within 3 corporate entities, and can produce that data in written form

Performance objectives in support of team and company goals

• Presents solutions when presenting problems (exceeds expectations when the proposed solution is implemented)
• Enthusiastically supports internal initiatives from his or her Sales Management team (exceeds expectations when observed advocating the initiatives to other colleagues on the sales team)
• Has a strong sense of business ethics (exceeds expectations when a good ethical decision may potentially, or did, result in personal loss)
• Willingness to help others on the team (exceeds expectations when observed volunteering to help another rep)

Here are some behaviors that are not measurable:

• Personality traits, including friendliness, sociability in the workplace, fashion sense (but see company-specified dress, above)
• Having a good relationship with other team members (hear me out on this: we know of one case where an ethical sales rep refused to join in on after-work bar gossip regarding other individuals in the company, and was ostracized himself for not participating in these "slam sessions." Individuals that pride themselves on "taking the high road" will often be perceived by less-ethical employees as being "aloof.")
• Communications styles: having a "friendly phone manner" is not measureable, because it's too subjective. (But "Uses first names on every call," on the other hand, can be measured.)

Additional tip on determining measurable performance objectives:

A great way to define measurable performance objectives it to visit with your reps side-by-side, in their workspaces, so you can see how they work and define aspects of performance that can be measured. This is an element that we cover in our inside sales coaching classes for managers, incidentally. Among these observable behaviors could be:

• Investigates CRM for same company contacts prior to making initial call to a new prospect
• Investigates company website prior to making initial call to a new prospect
• Takes no more than 3 minutes to investigate company website

The final word on criteria for Performance Measurement is this: every company has a slightly different sales performance situation, depending on what the reps were trained on, and how.  This is why you can --- and should --- determine your own. Add establishing a measurable, observable Performance Review process to your Best Management playbook.