Kelly is a busy sales manager who manages a team of B2B enterprise sales people. Working for ContourIQ, she has an expansive sales territory covering most of the Midwest of the United States. With nine sellers on her team, there are two top performers who she knows she can count on every quarter. At the bottom of the list are: one struggling long-term seller and two new salespeople. Sandwiched in the middle are her core performers, who typically deliver about 70% of their quota.

Before we can recommend how Kelly can best manage her business, we should first appreciate the end results she needs to achieve, and why these are the outcomes that matter.

In addition to having clear goals – what she must achieve – her manager, the VP of Enterprise Sales, has explained very clearly why these achievements matter; the external and internal pressures that are affecting the business.

Understanding the ‘why’ makes it easier for Kelly to develop strategies for the ‘what’. Kelly would describe the Goals and Pressures as follows:

• Make the Number: No surprise here, most sales managers are consumed with making the number. ContourIQ is in a rapidly expanding market and is striving for a market leadership position. ContourIQ has one very strong competitor, and there is concern that unless momentum is maintained, the opportunity will be lost.

• Increase Rep Productivity: Not every company uses this metric, but Kelly is also measured on revenue/head, therefore she is encouraged to maximize the productivity of her team. She also needs visibility on the balance of team performance, so that she might lessen her dependency on the two top performers.

• Build / Coach the Sales Team: Kelly and her manager recognize that ramp-up time for new salespeople is long. To maintain a low attrition rate, and maximize her sales results, she knows she needs to invest in developing the team.

• Provide Accurate Sales Forecasts and Annual
Revenue Guidance
: Kelly needs to provide accurate short-term sales forecasts and indicative medium-term revenue outcomes. One of the critical measures of excellence, from the CEO’s perspective, is the ability to understand risk, and have confidence in future business, and this responsibility flows down to Kelly and her team.
• Present Quarterly Reviews and Strategic Outlook: ContourIQ is on a fast growth path and needs to consistently learn what is working in the business, so they can correct as needed, and make the right strategic investments. Kelly needs to be able to explain deviations in her sales forecast every quarter, and provide insight into developments in her sales pipeline from the start of the previous quarter.

Though not all sales managers will have exactly the same goals as Kelly, the pressures – the ‘why’ she needs to achieve these goals – will be similar across most B2B sales organizations.

Great Sales Managers Have Great Rhythm

Crafting a framework for the cadence of Kelly’s business is
 a critical task. Without a routine for how she manages her many responsibilities, she will struggle to stay ahead, miss her short-term revenue goals, or leave the business exposed with a weak pipeline.

One key observation of effective sales managers is that they can balance short-term, current revenue activities (typically represented by the current sales forecast), with future business pursuits (represented by the pipeline). When most sales managers wake up every day, they are concerned about the deals on the table today. Good sales managers triage the opportunities, focusing where they can win and applying resources accordingly, while at the same time securing their future business by working on the pipeline.

Neither of these goals (short-term revenue or future business) will be achieved unless the team is performing. While Kelly
is working the two dimensions of forecast and pipeline to
 the right cadence, she needs to stay on top of the key sales performance metrics for the team, all of the time. Then, every quarter, she will need to prepare for her QBR. She needs to find her rhythm.

Here is what the cadence might look like in Kelly’s business:

To improve the operations of the sales business, Kelly needs to first understand the KPIs that matter. When she understands the KPIs that drive the business; things like number of deals, average deal size, win rate and sales cycle, she can then benchmark her team’s performance, on an aggregate and individual basis. She needs real-time visibility into their actual and historical KPIs and an understanding of how these are evolving over time. She might not use these every day, but she needs to have them as a reference point as she interacts with her team, coaching them to improve. She needs to consider their empirical strengths and weaknesses, to give her a compass to guide their direction.

Any business practice is most effective when it is consistent. People get into a rhythm, know what to expect and what they need to do for productive engagement. Kelly’s meetings should focus on issues arising from what is changing in her Must Win deals, managing risk to short-term revenue, and seeing what has impacted her forecast. We all know that a forecast is a moving target. Kelly needs to know where she stands, real time, or else seeing the way forward is nearly impossible.

Unless there is a healthy pipeline, Kelly’s business is in trouble. Pipeline management is too rarely treated as urgent, even though the strength of the pipeline is one of the most critical indicators of future sales. Kelly must institute a regular monthly pipeline review to ensure the health of the business going forward.

From FLSM to seller or FLSM to CSO, the value in regular QBRs is the insight it gives into past performance, to drive change in process or behavior, and to improve next quarter’s performance. Unless Kelly has an effective rear-view mirror, to assess what happened to her pipeline and forecast in the previous quarter, she will be exposed at her QBR, and won’t have the insights from which to learn from past experiences. Her forward-looking view will be hazy at best.

Sales Performance Management Cadence

When Kelly puts all of these together, she can develop
 a rhythm in her business, communicate schedule and expectation to her team and management, and reduce risk and surprise in the business. Here’s what a typical quarter might look like:

By balancing the important with the urgent, she will be more successful; particularly if she uses technology that automates the majority of the monitoring and delivery of insights.