What is Sales Excellence + 4 Tactics to Help You Achieve It

“Excellence” is a barometer of success throughout our lives. From our classrooms to our hobbies and careers, excellence is the demonstration of mastery – the perfect culmination of knowledge, effort, and experience. If you’ve chosen a sales career, you’ve probably seen the term “sales excellence.” But what is sales excellence and how can the average salesperson achieve it?

What is sales excellence?

Sales excellence is achieved when an individual salesperson – or the whole team – consistently meets and exceeds growth targets. It’s the result of deliberate and strategic efforts, rather than luck or favorable market conditions. It’s the reward that comes from continuously improving and refining your tools, skills, and processes in order to consistently beat your sales targets and win new customers.

4 Tactics for Achieving Sales Excellence

Hundreds of thousands of books, articles, webinars, and courses have been developed to help people achieve sales excellence. While there’s more than one way to peel an orange, most experts agree that sales excellence is the result of consistency, mastery, and high standards. While every salesperson has their own finesse, the basics of sales excellence generally remain the same – understand your ideal customer, offer the best solution for their needs, build rapport, and communicate effectively.

The following four tactics have been proven to help individuals, as well as entire sales organizations, attain excellence.

1. Create a repeatable process

61% of buyers say that a positive sales experience is one in which sales reps provide relevant information – and 51% expect a prompt response to their inquiries. These are pretty simple expectations to meet – if you’re not reinventing the wheel for every new prospect. If your sales department doesn’t have a sales enablement program, now is the time to look into creating one. Sales enablement programs support both of these buyer expectations by providing the knowledge, tools, and resources to ensure that everyone on the team can respond quickly and effectively to inbound leads. And considering that 30–50% of sales go to the company that responds first, providing a quick response is non-negotiable if you’re committed to excellence.

Segmenting your company’s ideal customers by persona and mapping those personas to a content library can reduce the amount of time spent preparing for sales meetings and responding to inquiries. A content library containing things like email templates and sequences, presentations, brochures, spec sheets, and case studies are a good first step, while more in-depth content like blog posts, eBooks, whitepapers, podcasts, and videos will establish credibility outside of traditional sales collateral. This article about how to create a sales enablement program gives good pointers on creating a content library.

2. Use operational metrics as a guide

It’s said that you miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take – so how can anyone expect to achieve sales excellence if they don’t know what they’re shooting for? Keep in mind that the road to excellence isn’t just about hitting sales quotas. In order to keep replicating success, you must acknowledge that the journey is just as important as the destination. Instead of obsessing over the goals, focus on the individual actions that will move you toward them. Concentrating on a handful of operational metrics targeting consistent and successful performance on top-of-funnel activities will almost guarantee a bull’s-eye.

Here are some suggestions:

• Number of calls made
• Number of emails sent
• Number of meetings/demos booked
• Number of offers sent

Setting and meeting the right operational metrics at the individual and department levels should translate into sales. If your department isn’t already using KPIs to keep a pulse on operations, you can correct course by keeping an eye on some of these 21 sales KPIs you should be tracking.

3. Have a plan - or plan to fail

Working in a busy sales department can feel like juggling chainsaws, but it’s possible to keep the chaos in order with good planning. Scheduling the next day’s plan before stopping work for the day can be a game changer. Pay particular attention to the operational tasks that feel thankless or are easy to put off – the ones that you don’t enjoy but are a necessary evil:

• When will you handle admin tasks? (e.g., entering information into the CRM, generating quotes/offers, pipeline review)
• When will you make your phone calls – and how many? The same goes for emails.
• When will you work on lead generation? What’s your target number?
• What time will you allocate to researching your competitors (e.g., offerings, current activities)? Which competitors?
• What time will you allocate to professional development/trendspotting? What mediums will you use?
• When will you prepare for your next meetings/demos? What needs to be done?
• What information or action have you promised to prospects? What time will you set aside to circle back, and what needs to happen before you respond?

Many productivity experts recommend allocating time in 30-minute intervals. This is enough time to make a dent in the task while allowing the opportunity to switch gears to less tedious tasks to improve concentration and motivation. Planning a day ahead also helps to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

4. Participate in regular professional development and practice

While Covid has changed the sales landscape, the field continues to evolve. Now and in the future, ongoing professional development will be more crucial than ever for sales reps wanting to achieve excellence. Training courses used to be the gold standard, but today’s salespeople have access to so much more! Even on a shoestring budget, books, webinars, and videos are plentiful and readily available to anyone who has the desire to learn. Scheduling just an hour or two each week can help reps sharpen their skills and stay abreast of industry trends. Those who really want to excel could ask a high-performer for coaching or mentorship. And don’t forget to practice what you’ve been learning. Achieving excellence requires people to go outside their comfort zone, so don’t be shy about trying out what you’ve learned. It might feel awkward at first, but the more you practice, the more comfortable you’ll feel and the better you’ll become.

How do you measure sales excellence?

Sales excellence can be quantitatively evaluated on a combination of sales performance, productivity, and proficiency metrics. Performance metrics determine whether the reps are achieving the organization’s goals – these are typically sales revenue, year-over-year growth, customer acquisition cost, average customer lifetime value, and the percentage of sales reps meeting their quotas. Sales productivity metrics measure operational efficiency – typically things like percentage of time spent on selling, number of sales tools used daily, percentage of high-quality leads pursued, and percentage of marketing collateral used. Finally, sales proficiency metrics measure how competent the team is at closing deals – these are typically things like time to quota, time to first deal, time to ramp, and time to productivity. Looking at proficiency metrics per individual rep can help managers to identify training and coaching opportunities.

Sales reps who achieve excellence tend to be skilled collaborators who are diligent, curious, and well-prepared. These qualitative metrics are equally important though less concrete.

Plecto Can Help You Achieve Sales Excellence

Plecto is loaded with features and functionality to support your team on the path toward sales excellence! Plecto integrates with most major sales-tracking software, making it almost effortless to track KPIs on real-time sales performance dashboards and automated reporting. Personal KPI dashboards for each sales rep can increase motivation while helping management stay up to date on how the team is performing.

Sign up for a free 14-day trial and see how Plecto can help your team achieve excellence!