It’s well known that:
Top performers comprise the top 20% of your sales performance chart.

The lowest performers live on the bottom 20%.

The middle resides in the middle 60%.
But do you know who is who—or how to coach them to higher performance levels? What about know when it’s time to let them go?

Once you know what your desired end result are, it’s time to separate your sales wheat from the chaff. Here are 4 steps to doing it fast and well:

1) Generate a quick report of every rep by target earnings—or by:

• Base salary
• Bonuses
• SPIF
• Incentive payout

2) Then look at attainment of whatever you want to measure. For example:

• Margin
• Product sales
• Territory

3) Next, put this information on a simple X Y chart, and look for outliers. (Your sales compensation tool should let you do this in just a few clicks.) Say you find someone who cashed out at 125% of his targeted earnings, but only attained 60% of 75 quota. That’s a problem.

4) Pay immediately. Research shows that the sooner you pay someone, the better they’ll link their behavior to that reward—and keep doing what you want they to do. At Xactly, we will physically walk down hall with envelopes of cash to pay our sales reps for particular SPIFs.

What’d you find?