How can you manage your sales performance?

By Fabien Paupier

Published: November 14, 2024

Sales is at the heart of your business. It's all about defining objectives, then giving yourself the means to achieve them. How do you go about it?

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Your sales strategy

What's at stake?

A company can only develop and survive if it has customers. The sales plan is therefore decisive. The challenge is to :

find new customers,
retain existing customers,
distribute the customer portfolio and associated sales in a healthy way.

The business plan

The Business Plan (BP) is your business model. It sets out your value proposition, the context in which you operate, and the levers for developing your business. For example, the BP will reflect your break-even point, among other indicators. You'll set your monthly sales target, the number of customers you need to reach, and so on.

Marketing studies

Your marketing and sales strategy must be backed up by this BP. This is based on contextual elements: market research, competitor research, and then concrete elements: marketing mix, operational marketing. Your offer should be developed on the basis of a detailed SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats). This means assessing your environment, as well as your strengths and weaknesses, to position yourself pragmatically and judiciously in your market.

Your sales objectives

Your Sales Action Plan (SAP) takes a more operational approach. Once you've set your objectives, you need to define precisely the actions you'll take to achieve them. This involves answering the fundamental questions: Who? Who? When? How? The CAP therefore starts from a major objective in the BP, for example: to capture 5% of the small electrical appliance market over 3 years, and translates it into sub-objectives, such as: to acquire 15 new customers, to increase our sales per customer by 20%, to achieve a 30% loyalty rate.

Your action plan

Each of these objectives needs to be corroborated by short- and medium-term actions, with a named person responsible for each: your sales manager, for example, or your entire sales force. Actions can be :

focus on performance: a target of 2 new customers per month, for example,
be organizational: for example, the creation of marketing and sales pairs,
or management-related, such as the creation of a target-based bonus.

Steering: keys to monitoring

Taking a step back

A strategy is only useful if you stick to it. The risk is in defining directives without giving yourself the practical means to follow them up. Day-to-day business and emergency management easily take over. The result is that, with our heads in the game, we forget our good resolutions and unconsciously adopt a management style that is more dependent on context than proactive.

Setting milestones

So how do you go about it? It's essential to set up follow-up indicators. For each action, set yourself a deadline: to have acquired 5 new customers within three months, or to have absorbed 5% sales growth within 6 months. And at regular intervals, evaluate the progress you've made towards meeting these intermediate targets.

Use visual representation

At first glance, figures don't really speak for themselves, unless you compare them, cross-check them... and derive an underlying trend. It's in the form of graphs that your data will be most explicit. Visual representation is a decisive help. Some Business Intelligence (BI) software packages, such as Vizzboard, offer a simple, meaningful way of visualizing your data. Without requiring any prior knowledge, the solution provides you with different representations. These can be used, for example, by management to take stock and communicate internally.

Deepen your analysis

If your business already has numerous data sources, how do you reconcile them in a single tool? Here, you need to look at the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) available on BI solutions. With a tool like Bime Analytics, for example, the diversity of your data sets is no longer an obstacle... quite the contrary. Able to connect to some fifty sources, both web-based and static, the tool mixes all your information and gives you a synthetic and relevant reading.

Analyze your competitive environment

Given that BI solutions are capable of processing massive amounts of data, why not use them for your competitive intelligence? Keeping an eye on your competitors - their offers, prices, practices and innovations - is crucial to your sales policy. But it can be laborious and time-consuming. Unless your BI tool takes care of it. Human Responsive makes it possible. The software conducts a detailed price watch on current rates, to help you design your marketing campaigns. The aim is to give you an edge over the competition, and ultimately gain market share.

Day-to-day management requires the right tools: dashboards with relevant analyses, illustrated with an explicit visual representation, as with Vizzboard, or enriched with in-depth macro-data, as with Bime Analytics. BI offers a level of analysis that is beneficial to the business, both as an aid to decision-making and in the form of active intelligence via a solution such as Human Responsive.