Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series:  Understanding Rep Performance

By Rob Kall, CEO & Co-founder Cien.ai

Do you have a rep performance management problem?

It’s naïve to think that you can get a sales team of all A-players, so how do you know if your team has adequate performance? Start by segmenting your team into overperformers (your true A-players), performers, and underperformers based on two factors: their relative production compared to their peers (same roles and markets) and industry benchmarks. Do not include ramping reps. Now just count the % of underperformers compared to all reps. Ideally, they account for less than 33% of all reps. Over 50% is cause for concern. 

How do you transform a poor-performing team?

So how do you fix this? The fastest and easiest is of course to just “manage out” underperformers, but if that is always the default option you will most likely part way with reps that had good potential, but were never able to realize it. The by far biggest factor impacting rep performance is having a quality pipeline. How do reps get that pipeline? How much of it is prospected by the reps themselves, received by BDRs, or generated from existing accounts? If you expect reps to “eat what they kill”, do they have the underlying skills such as the ability to engage prospects and do effective discovery? Get the facts, start coaching, and keep the coachable reps. That, combined with an effective comp plan that encourages the desired behaviors will create a strong sales culture.

What does success look like? 

Simple: most reps are improving quarter over quarter and you as a revenue leader understand why some of your reps are the overperformers. As one of our PE operating partners said about a recent project with a SaaS portfolio company: “Fast growth had led to poor performance management.  Understanding not just who was underperforming, but also why, turned that around.”

About the Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series 

This article is part of our Growth Essentials Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the non-technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the technical details of how to measure the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Practical RevOps Analytics Series”. 

Contact

Rob Kall, Cien.ai, +1 305 496 4404, media@cien.ai, www.cien.ai

SOURCE Cien.ai