Benchmarking sales performance
How good are you? are you better than your competition? — every business can benefit from benchmarking. Successful benchmarking helps you to compare performance, control costs, look at process design and review business strategy. Benchmarking is a process that compares your business activities to similar companies or across your company. It questions what you are doing, identifies opportunities for improvement and often provides the momentum necessary for implementing change.
How we benchmark
For this reason we have partnered with CSO Insights to provide a sales benchmarking service to the CxO or Sales Director. Every year for 12 years CSO Insights have conducted a comprehensive survey of sales organisations in the field. These organisations are asked about their priorities, challenges, and successes. The resulting reports are rich with information and performance metrics that you can use to assess your sales efforts and best practices you can follow in your quest for improvement.
Benchmarking results
Depending on your objectives, you may identify
- differences in performance indicators
e.g. higher staff turnover or lower gross margins - Differences in processes
e.g. how you recruit or why you win and lose - Differences in strategy
e.g. different drivers of sales success
What action to take
Once you have the results there will normally be several options open to you:
- Change your focus to key areas for improvement
- Adapt your processes for efficiency and effectiveness
- Do nothing
- Accept that there is a good reason for the difference
See how benchmarking helped improve performance for a client
Benchmarking feedback
Our Benchmarking partner
CSO Insights is a research firm that specializes in measuring the effectiveness of today's sales and marketing organizations. They benchmark the challenges these companies are facing and more importantly assess how they are using people, process, technology and knowledge to optimise their performance.
Common issues
Issues that might benefit from a benchmarking approach include:
- • Poor compared to peers
- • Not meeting sales targets
- • Reviewing sales strategy
- • Improve CRM performance
- • Cost cutting demands
Key aspects
Some of the key things that make benchmarking are:
- • Use systematic metrics
- • Highlight key areas
- • Identify hidden issues
- • Provide ongoing metrics
- • Cover all sales areas
- • Provide impetus for change