How Performance Dashboards Drive Account Based Sales

An excerpt from Bridging the Gap: The Ultimate Guide to Account Based Sales & Marketing.

Okay, so you’re tracking key metrics that drive account based sales success. How do you make them matter to your personnel?

The answer is developing a compelling, clear dashboard of their key metrics, preferably showing real-time performance. A well-designed dashboard for SDRs and Account Executives should revolve around goals, while adding context to how each rep is performing relative to expectations.

Creating Account Based Performance Dashboards

Saless leaders should choose a select group of key metrics that not only measure productivity, but performance as well. The more real-time, personalized and interactive each dashboard, the better. The goal with dashboards is to let performance data itself be the driver of KPI goals, rather than forcing managers to be drill sergeants.

The challenges in sustaining commitment and keeping processes tight will be substantial. By adding or altering expectations around goals and behaviors, you’re creating change and thus naturally triggering anxiety. You face the difficulty of creating buy-in that your new strategy is an improvement on the prior process your personnel have been trained to follow.

Last but not least, old habits die hard. Even if you succeed in getting early adoption, there’s a real probability that adherence to the new strategy will taper off over time as people revert back to behaviors with which they feel more comfortable.

Engagement is a journey rather than a destination. Sustained engagement requires personalized missions and a commitment to coaching. But most of all, it requires a sales and marketing team that internalizes feelings of accountability towards their KPIs and to the overall process.

Those feelings do not come naturally. The de facto payoff for sales, marketing and service professionals is in hitting objectives, not activity benchmarks.

Every sales organization worth its weight in salt is already incentivizing key sales objectives, of course. Which is why your performance dashboard should be about something else entirely: Using real-time visual feedback on how ABS team members are performing across key activity metrics. At the end of the day, your performance dashboard is about rewarding the behaviors that drive your long-term goals, via positive feedback loops, public recognition and a sense of personal accomplishment.

Do's/Don'ts of Account Based Performance Dashboards

Let's start with the "Don'ts" in building an account based performance dashboard. In our personal experience working with ABS leaders who use Ambition to build dashboards, here are the most common errors we've seen sales leaders make:  

1. Take the Big Brother approach to using technology.
2. Chastise poor performers and non-compliants publicly.
3. Implement workplace contests around a single KPI.
4. Offer impersonal rewards for great performance. (Ex. gift cards).

Such tactics not only fail to solve the issue of KPI accountability, they often exacerbate the very problems they’re attempting to solve. To that point, it’s important to elucidate measures that are actually proven to accomplish the goal of sustained KPI accountability.

Understand that the natural response of your personnel to KPIs will be negative and that the primary cause of their antipathy will likely go to the data implementation required to track KPIs. Not only is data implementation tedious and time-consuming, it’s a momentum killer that forces your employees to redirect their attention away from the revenue-generating activities they’re paid to perform.

A seemingly insurmountable set of problems, right? Actually, quite the opposite. Before you get discouraged and decide to ditch this entire initiative, look into adopting the five measures we’re about to share with you:

1. Automate data entry
2. Grant access to relevant KPI data
3. Incentivize team communication
4. Run holistic contests
5. Recognize strong KPI performance

While some of these measures may seem facially obvious, there’s actually a relative degree of nuance to their proper execution. To see them fleshed out, direct your attention to the video below.

Using a combination of tools like Outreach, Salesforce and Ambition, sales leaders can easily implement accurate, up-to-date dashboards across their sales force. Better yet, they can equip these dashboards with all 5 "Do's" referenced above.

There’s a synergy to all 5 of these measures: with the exception of data entry automation, they’re all natural enhancers of organizational communication. And over time, their value-adds will become more and more pronounced, in terms of aligning not just the actual processes in your sales and marketing efforts, but the communication amongst each team’s personnel.

For its part, the value-adds of data automation - in terms of both input and output - start stacking up thanks to increased efficiency, workflow, data accuracy and rep accountability. In other words, the key components of a healthy, successful account based sales process.  These forces essentially guarantee a return-on-investment that's both immediate and continuing into perpetuity.

Once your personnel start seeing their new process and KPIs not as a source of tedium and anxiety, but of empowerment, the climb to the summit is almost over. Your account based sales process will start kicking into high gear.

As a parting note, it's important to remember that the true potential of your business team will always be predicated upon the raw talent, artistry and perseverance of its membership. The purpose of KPI-driven performance dashboards is to enhance and refine those aspects of your personnel. The better your dashboards, the greater your progress.

To learn more about how companies like Outreach use Ambition to drive their account based sales process, check out our YouTube channel. And to get your free copy of the 63 page Bridging the Gap eBook, click here. Thanks for reading and best of luck to your ABS initiatives moving forward. 

Ambition: Drive Sales Performance and Accountability

Ambition is a sales management platform that syncs business teams, data sources, and performance metrics on one system.

Modern sales leaders use Ambition to enhance sales performance insights and run supercharged sales reports, scorecards, contests, and TVs via drag-and-drop interface.  

Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review and AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization). Hear more from business leaders who use Ambition in their organization.

Watch Testimonials:

1. FiveStars: Adam Wall. Sr. Manager of Sales Operations . 
2. Filemaker: Brad Freitag. Vice-President of Worldwide Sales.
3. Outreach: Mark Kosoglow. Vice-President of Sales.
4. Cell Marque: Lauren Hopson. Director of Sales & Marketing.
5. Access America Transport: Ted Alling. Chief Executive Officer.

Watch Product Walkthroughs:

1. ChowNow. Led by Vice-President of Sales, Drew Woodcock.
2. Outreach. Led by Sales Development Manager, Alex Lynn.
3. AMX Logistics. Led by Executive Vice-President ,Jared Moore.

Read Case Studies:

1. Clayton Homes: HBR finds triple-digit growth in 3 sales efficiency metrics. 
2. Coyote Logistics: Monthly revenue per broker grew $525 in 6 months.
3. Peek: Monthly sales activity volume grew 142% in 6 months.
4. Vorsight: Monthly sales conversations grew 300% in 6 months.

Contact us to learn how Ambition can impact your sales organization today.