Imagine this: Your sales team is tasked with selling 50 subscriptions for your time tracking tool, but they end up selling 80. That's a sales performance win.

When your team is equipped with skilled sales reps, aligned departments (sales, marketing, customer success), well-organized sales enablement content, and streamlined workflows, strong sales results follow.

But not every sales team hits those remarkable targets.

In this article, we'll break down why some teams struggle to achieve strong sales performance and provide actionable steps to turn things around.

With 54% of salespeople saying that selling became more difficult in 2024, the key to success is refining your approach. Top sales performance requires understanding customer needs, leveraging data, and continually optimizing processes. 

We'll dive into strategies to boost sales performance, the right tools and tech to use, and the importance of relationship-building.

What Is Sales Performance?

Sales performance refers to how well the team is hitting their quotas for the month, quarter, or year; their ability to convert prospects into customers; and their knack for building and sustaining customer relationships, among other things.

Sales performance plays a crucial role in a company's financial success. Strong performance suggests that the business is effectively marketing its products or services, which drives higher revenue and profits. It also highlights the efficiency of the sales process and the company’s capacity to satisfy customer needs.

How to Measure Sales Performance

Sales performance is typically measured through metrics like revenue, win rates, and customer retention. But it's not just about the numbers—soft skills like negotiation, communication, and responsiveness are just as important.

To get a complete picture of how your team is performing, it's essential to track both the hard data and the more subjective aspects of their approach. Many organizations turn to sales enablement and conversation intelligence software to gather insights on how the team is using resources, interacting with prospects, and ultimately closing deals.

The first step in measuring your sales team’s productivity and performance is choosing the right metrics to track. While sales metrics depend on various factors, here are the six key metrics you should be focusing on:

1. Sales revenue

Sales revenue refers to the total revenue generated from sales activities within a specific period.

Why track this metric: You'll be able to assess sales targets and your company’s financial goals.

Here’s how you calculate sales revenue if you’re a product-based company:

Sales Revenue = Number of Products Sold x Price per Product

Consider this: You’re selling a project management tool worth $20 per month/user for the Standard plan and $50 per month/user for the Premium plan. If you sell 20 subscriptions (20 users) for the Standard plan and 30 subscriptions (30 users) for the Premium plan, the total revenue will be $1,900 (20 x $20; 30 x $50) per month.

Revenue by Salesperson is another metric to consider. This measures the revenue each sales rep generates in a given period (weekly, monthly, or annually). Assessing individual performance can help identify top performers and areas where additional coaching or support may be required.

If you’re a service-based company, here’s how you calculate sales revenue:

Sales Revenue = Number of Customers x Average Price of Services Provided

2. Win rate

Win rate is the percentage of final-stage prospects that close and become customers divided by the total number of deals in the pipeline. It gauges a sales rep’s overall performance in a given period (weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually).

Why track this metric: With this metric, you can determine whether your sales and marketing efforts are targeting the right prospects.

Here's how you calculate the win rate:

Win Rate = Closed Won Deals / (Closed Won Deals + Lost Deals)

For example, let’s say your team won 30 clients in the first quarter and lost 40 in the same quarter. 

Here's what your team’s win rate looks like: 

30 closed won deals / (30 closed won deals + 40 lost deals ) x 100 = 42.8%

3. Sales cycle length

Sales cycle length refers to the average time it takes a rep to complete a sale—from the first contact to signing the contract.

Why track this metric: Tracking this metric helps you identify inefficiencies in your process (such as longer sales cycles), anticipate busy periods, and better manage cash flow.

Here's how you calculate sales cycle length:

Average Sales Cycle Length = Total Number of Days for All Closed Deals / Number of Closed Deals

For instance, you've closed 5 deals in a month, with the following durations: 

• Deal 1: 30 days
• Deal 2: 20 days
• Deal 3: 50 days
• Deal 4: 40 days
• Deal 5: 20 days

The calculation would be:

Total Days: 

30+20+50+40+20=160 days

Number of Closed Deals: 5

Thus, your average sales cycle length = 160 / 5 = 32

This means that, on average, it takes 32 days to close a deal.

4. Average deal size 

Average deal size is the amount of money a business generates with each deal their sales team closes.

Why track this metric: Tracking this metric helps you uncover customer trends, understand how much customers are willing to invest in your solution, and determine revenue targets and forecast sales. It helps you discover opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.

Here's the formula for average deal size:

Average Deal Size = Total Revenue Generated / Total Number of Closed Won Deals

Imagine a company generates $700,000 in revenue by closing 70 deals, your average deal size would be: 

$700,000 in revenue / 70 closed won deals = $100,000

5. Customer acquisition cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost associated with acquiring a new customer.

Why to track this metric: Tracking this metric helps you determine customer profitability and efficiency in your sales process.

Here’s how you calculate customer acquisition cost: 

Customer Acquisition Cost = Total Sales and Marketing Expenses / Number of New Customers Acquired

Total sales and marketing expenses: This includes all costs related to marketing and sales efforts over a specific period. Common expenses to consider are:

• Advertising costs
• Salaries of sales and marketing staff
• Software and tools used for sales and marketing
• Overhead costs related to sales and marketing activities

Let's say a business spends $70,000 on marketing and sales in a quarter and acquires 1,400 new customers, the CAC will be calculated as follows: 

$70,000 / 1,400 = $50

This means the business spent $50 to acquire each new customer.

6. Customer retention rate

Customer retention rate (CRR) is the percentage of customers a company retains over a given period.

Why track this metric: Monitoring this helps you gauge how effectively your business retains existing customers and minimizes churn.

Here's the formula to calculate CRR:

CRR = ([(E - N)]/S) x 100

Where:

• E = Number of customers at the end of the period
• N = Number of new customers acquired during the period
• S = Number of customers at the start of the period

For example, if a subscription-based streaming company starts with 1,500 customers (S), acquires 400 new customers (N), and ends the period with 1,800 customers (E).

Retained Customers: 1800 - 400 = 1400 retained customers

Apply the CRR formula: 

CRR = (1400 / 1500) x 100 = 93.333%

This means that the company retained 93.3% of its original customer base over that period.

Now that you know the metrics to evaluate your team’s sales performance, let's break down the exact tools you can use to track these metrics and the techniques to measure sales team productivity.

Tools for measuring sales performance

Technology and automation can be great for your sales team, but only if they're used the right way. Over a third of employees (37%) say they’re overwhelmed by too many tools, and 36% feel that switching between different platforms actually slows them down.

To make things easier, focus on tools that make everyday tasks simpler, like dashboards or CRMs for managing customer information, or AI-powered tools that help prioritize leads and personalize outreach. It’s even better if these tools can work together, so your processes from finding new leads to closing deals are all in sync.

Some examples of tools you can leverage:

• Salesforce Sales Cloud offers a variety of features designed to boost sales performance, including lead and contact management, sales forecasting, workflow automation, and robust analytics.
• Superlayer is an AI-powered conversation intelligence platform that helps sales teams leverage data to improve performance. Through AI, sales reps and managers can gain insights into sales calls, track deal progress, and forecast revenue. Key features include prompt-based targeting for analyzing each call, customizable scorecards to evaluate individual rep performance, and call analytics that provide deeper insights for effective coaching.

Now that we know how to measure sales team productivity and performance and some of the tools we could use to make this happen, let’s dive into what effective sales performance looks like and what sets high-performing reps apart.

What Does a High-Performing Sales Team Look Like?

A high-performing sales team is driven by clear goals, focused on the customer, well-trained, collaborative, adaptable, resilient, and data-driven.

These traits help sales reps stay accountable to their targets, prioritize customer needs, strengthen their problem-solving skills, and make decisions backed by performance data.

Sales teams with these qualities often see real results, such as:

• Surpassing sales quotas
• Increased customer satisfaction
• Stronger revenue growth

Factors Affecting Sales Team Performance & Productivity

Sales performance can be influenced by various factors, including industry changes, inefficient processes, and skill gaps. However, the most significant barrier is that the average sales rep wastes about 14 out of 51 hours a week on non-selling tasks, such as administrative tasks. That valuable time could be better spent engaging directly with potential clients.

Here’s a closer look at the factors that affect sales performance:

Skill level

A sales rep's ability to close deals is closely tied to their skill level. Here’s how it breaks down:

• Beginner: These reps have basic sales skills and limited product knowledge, resulting in minimal sales and the need for extensive coaching.
• Intermediate: With more experience, these reps understand the product well, can explain its features effectively, and excel at building rapport and negotiating. They consistently exceed quotas.
• High-performing: These reps have a deep understanding of the product, industry trends, and competition. They possess top-notch communication, negotiation, and analytical skills, enabling them to consistently exceed quotas, drive customer satisfaction, and contribute to business growth.

Motivation

When sales reps are recognized, given incentives, and receive positive feedback, they’re more likely to stay motivated and exceed their sales targets.

On the flip side, low motivation can lead to disengagement, which in turn hampers productivity.

Sales reps can be motivated by:

• Setting a balance of individual and team goals
• Conducting performance reviews through direct feedback from sales managers rather than relying on a rating scale
• Receiving rewards that go beyond just financial incentives

Team alignment

According to HubSpot’s 2024 Sales Trends Report, only 59% of sales reps say they get high-quality leads from their marketing team.

Sales teams expect higher quality leads and transparent data from marketing and customer success teams. The only way to achieve this is to remove data silos, which leads to a more consistent customer experience and greater collaboration and alignment between departments.

Customer experience

The quality of customer interactions is a dealbreaker when it comes to closing deals. If you're doing any of the following, the chances of losing deals are higher:

• The customer is ready to purchase, but you're overwhelming them with discovery questions.
• Sales reps take weeks to respond to in-app inquiries.
• You fail to show how your product can solve their specific needs.
• You ignore their objections and continue to hard-sell the solution.

These actions create a frustrating and disappointing customer experience, thus hurting your sales performance.

Sales enablement

When sales enablement content is disorganized and sales reps struggle to find relevant information quickly, it leads to unpreparedness during customer interactions, resulting in lost opportunities.

This also causes sales reps to spend more time searching for information than engaging with prospects, leading to delays in capturing their interest and ultimately allowing competitors to win the deal.

Business processes

When sales reps don’t have streamlined workflows, clear documentation, or an organized sales tech stack, you end up spending more time on non-selling activities—and your overall workflow is quite scattered.

Inefficiencies in the process can give the impression that a sales team isn't performing, when the true issue lies within the system itself.

Take, for example, a sales rep who successfully piques buyers' interest and gets them ready to close. Yet, each deal stalls because pricing approval requires several sign-offs from sales leaders, finance, the CRO, and even the CEO. This delay frustrates prospects, leading them to lose interest or turn to a competitor.

While it may seem like the rep can't close the deal, the real problem is the complicated approval process that causes roadblocks at the final stage.

Pricing and budget

Even the most skilled sales reps can't overcome challenges like poor product-market fit or pricing issues on their own. Many times, pricing objections stem from deeper concerns. For example, customers may not see the value of your solution when compared to more affordable options, or they might be factoring in additional costs like training and maintenance, which can lower the perceived value.

Sometimes, the problem is a genuine budget constraint, or the customer might simply be seeking a better alternative. This can slow down deals and make it seem like the sales rep isn't performing. To address this, equip your sales reps with objection-handling training. By focusing on the return on investment (ROI) or offering flexible pricing options, they can keep the sales process moving forward.

Actionable Steps to Improve Sales Performance

1. Set clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Define what you want to achieve: increasing revenue, expanding market share, or improving customer retention.

Based on your goal, create specific objectives. Ensure your goals follow the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound).

Once defined, align your KPIs with your goals. Common sales KPIs include win rate, average deal size, revenue growth, customer acquisition cost, and customer retention rate.

2. Provide continuous training and coaching

Now that you’ve identified your sales KPIs, it’s time to audit your team’s skill level. To do this, review the sales meetings conducted by each rep in the last 30 days. Here’s how you can identify skill gaps:

• Send quarterly surveys to your sales team to ask about the challenges they face during sales calls. Review the survey results and connect with reps one-on-one to understand their challenges in detail.
• Conduct performance reviews to assess individual reps against their KPIs. Based on the review, you can identify each rep’s strengths and weaknesses.

Once you have identified gaps in your reps’ sales skills, provide them constructive feedback, and use roleplays to help them improve.

• Leverage Roleplays: Focus on specific skills you want reps to improve, such as objection handling, closing techniques, or product demos. Develop scenarios and pair reps together to enact them. Afterward, provide feedback on the roleplay to guide their improvement
• Use Shadowing: Pair less experienced reps with seasoned ones. During live sales calls, the newer reps can observe the experienced reps’ sales processes, gain insights into various techniques, and apply them to their own approach.
• Analyze Sales Call Recordings: Ask reps to record their sales calls and share them with the sales manager. By reviewing the recordings, managers can pinpoint areas where the rep needs improvement, what went wrong, and what could be done better.
• Create Personalized Sales Programs: Once you understand your reps’ challenges, provide targeted training to develop the specific skills they need.

3. Leverage technology for automation and analytics

Without technology, reps deal with issues like poor lead quality, administrative tasks, communication issues, lack of team alignment, and inability to receive personalized coaching.

When sales managers and sales leaders adopt technology and automate their sales activities, they can stay on top of a variety of tasks, including:

• Scheduling follow-up emails 
• Automating multi-channel outreach
• Auto-dialing phone numbers
• Transcribing and analyzing sales calls
• Scheduling meetings
• Routing and scoring leads
• Updating data in the CRM and lead enrichment
• Generating sales reports and analytics

By automating these sales activities, your teams spend less time on non-selling activities, and spend more time on building relationships and closing deals. This automatically improves your sales team productivity.

4. Encourage collaboration and effective communication

Use tools like Slack, Zoom, Google Calendar, and Google Meet to enhance collaboration. Some AI sales productivity tools like Superlayer also offer features that help you organize call recordings in a way that makes it easier for teams to access and review important sales conversations.

Superlayer’s Playlist feature, for example, streamlines the process of managing and sharing these recordings. Team members can collaborate more effectively, share insights, and provide feedback on sales calls. This ensures everyone is aligned, learning from each other’s experiences, and can continuously improve their sales performance together.

5. Regularly analyze and optimize performance metrics

Schedule monthly performance reviews to evaluate sales performance against the established goals. During these reviews, focus on the following:

• Compare actual results with expected outcomes to identify any gaps
• Analyze performance trends to pinpoint what’s working and what needs improvement
• Review historical data to perform sales trend analysis and create more accurate sales forecasts

Use these insights to refine and adjust your sales goals for better alignment and continuous improvement.

How Superlayer Can Help Improve Sales Team Productivity

From boosting sales team productivity to identifying key opportunities, Superlayer excels in enhancing every aspect of the sales process. Here’s how Superlayer can improve your sales team’s productivity.

Automating CRM updates to save time

Superlayer offers time-saving CRM integrations, like HubSpot, and streamlines the workflows of sales teams. Superlayer saves over 20% of your sales team’s time and increases CRM accuracy and completeness by over 50% by automatically adding the relevant information into your database directly from customer interactions.

The platform enables you to create and update custom notes within HubSpot, tailored to different teams or groups. This customization allows each team or individual to define how their interactions and data are recorded and accessed, streamlining communication and ensuring all relevant information is easily accessible.

AI-powered conversation insights for coaching and feedback

• Batch Analysis Functionality: Superlayer enhances call analysis by processing up to 50 calls at once, revealing deeper patterns. It helps sales reps identify key pain points, questions, and requested features while providing sales leaders with insights to create personalized coaching material.

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• Customizable Scorecards: Superlayer additionally offers quantitative feedback through customizable scorecards that users define by setting prompts for various aspects of a conversation, such as: 

• Relevance
• Understanding client needs and pains
• Matching solutions to those needs
• Asking probing questions
• Identifying the buying process and stakeholders
• Providing proof points
• Addressing concerns and objections

Each category is scored based on specific criteria, creating a measurable reflection of interaction quality and effectiveness. This system not only tracks performance but also reveals trends over time, enabling continuous improvement.

For example, you might evaluate eight categories on a scale from zero to one, with a final score reflecting the interaction's overall effectiveness and highlighting areas for improvement.

This enables a comprehensive assessment of individual and team performance across these categories. By aggregating data from various conversations, Superlayer provides a holistic view of team effectiveness and the overall operational pulse of the organization.

This broad perspective allows managers and leaders to gauge performance trends and team dynamics without the need to analyze each conversation individually, streamlining the process of pinpointing improvement areas and recognizing successes.

• Prompt-Based Targeting: With this feature, you can navigate through the recordings based on predefined prompts. These prompts are relevant to the kind of analysis you want to do or the critical topics discussed during the calls—sales coaching, sales methodology, follow-up emails, and call notes. The platform then analyzes and generates the result based on your chosen prompt.

Real-time analytics to track team performance and identify improvement areas

Once the call is completed, you can also track the metrics associated with each sales call. These include:

• Speaking ratio
• Talking ratio
• Talk time
• Speed
• Longest monologue
• Main speaker
• Less engaged attendee

Predictive insights for better sales forecasting and resource allocation

Integrating Superlayer into your sales calls allows the bot to record and generate detailed transcripts. With its conversation intelligence, users can uncover patterns, evaluate sales team performance, and make data-driven decisions for future interactions.

The platform offers valuable insights through comprehensive conversation analysis, helping businesses pinpoint root causes and identify customer objections.

By feeding call transcription analysis into your CRM, real-time data enables adjustments to forecast models, ensuring your predictions align more accurately with actual performance.

Amplify Your Sales Team’s Performance with Superlayer

Your sales team’s performance depends on multiple factors, such as sales skills, team alignment, customer experience, business processes, and the KPIs set.

Superlayer can act as your team’s virtual coach, helping you analyze every sales call and providing insights on what worked and what could be improved during the calls. This gives each rep clarity into their weaknesses and how they can improve their performance and achieve better results.

Want to see how Superlayer can work for you and your team? Book a demo.

FAQs

How to make a sales team more effective?

To make your sales team more effective, set clear goals, provide ongoing coaching and training, leverage automation, empower seamless communication, and analyze performance metrics to refine your sales goals. 

How do you handle an underperforming sales team?

To handle an underperforming sales team, first, audit their challenges and identify the exact reason why they're underperforming. Once done, use coaching techniques—sales roleplays and shadowing—and provide feedback to help them overcome their weaknesses. Additionally, you can create personalized training programs for these reps to address their individual challenges. 

How do I increase my sales performance?

To increase your sales performance, analyze your customer interactions, understand their pain points, and spot patterns.

For example, you can review the call analytics for each sales call and ask your sales manager to share their feedback. You can also leverage sales roleplays and shadowing techniques to improve your sales skills. Additionally, adopt sales automation tools like Superlayer to automate your sales process and speed up manual processes.

How can you enable your sales team to perform better?

To enable your sales team to perform better, set clear sales goals, invest in sales training and technology, provide constructive feedback regularly, celebrate team and individual achievements, and constantly analyze the data to make informed decisions.