Business Ideas from FinallyFast
A sales performance review is a review of an employee’s performance when they sell a company’s product or service. Businesses use these types of performance reviews to analyze their sales techniques and presentations, and look for areas which require improvement. Although some people may think the beginning of the year is the best time for businesses to review their sales performance, you can actually generate noticeable results by giving the reviews at any point during the year. Feedback can boost morale, improve performance, and can also help resolve issues and get to the bottom of factors effecting employee performance.
When To Give The Reviews
Although many businesses give their sales performance reviews on an annual basis, a monthly or quarterly review might be your best bet. With an annual review, problems in accounts sit on the books for months, and low productivity flies under the radar, creating more loss. Your employees may find the different approach for sales unusual at first, but the more frequent reviews will actually yield regular spikes of high volume sales, and improved morale.
How To Construct The Reviews
- Compare recent profit and loss statements to your short-and long-range goals in order to see how you measure up. Use the comparison to determine your sales goals for the upcoming year. These goals will also help you determine the top salespeople on your payroll.
- Communicate to your sales staff the sales goals for the upcoming year. In addition, note that periodic reviews will be performed in order to reach these goals.
- Have your staff compile a list of individual accomplishments achieved since their last review. This will this make them feel as though they are going into the performance review with a good measure of their actual performance, and help to refresh your memory when it comes to deals they have closed and projects they have worked on.
- At the end of each quarterly or monthly sales period, determine the amount of sales that each member of your sales staff made, ranking them by their achievement.
- Give each salesperson their review for the period. Go over the salesperson’s list of individual accomplishments, and point out the ones that have contributed to business. Communicate to them whether they have met the sales goals or not, and discuss bonuses, raises, or promotions according to their rank if necessary. If the salesperson did not reach the sales goals, discuss how the goals will be achieved in the next sales period. When you are offering your feedback, positive or negative, be sure to provide concrete examples that illustrate your point. Finally, have the salesperson sign the performance review, and keep it in their personnel record.
I agree with you about once a year reviews. I feel that a annual review is just too little feedback for any salesperson to work with. If you are trying your best, but your not doing things just right, you will need to wait an entire year to find out. This is not only frustrating for the employee, but it’s also a bad strategy for the company. It would be like only giving a race car a tune-up once a year, when winning races is important. An employee needs to be working at 100% efficiency, and needs to get there as quickly as possible. Great post! This is a very important topic.
Thank you for the great comment! I love the use of the Car imagery.