Your team has the talent. So why aren't the numbers reflecting it?
The gap between sales potential and sales performance doesn’t come down to one simple solution.
If you're looking for proven ways to improve sales performance and keep increasing sales performance quarter over quarter, you're in the right place.
Read on to learn how to improve sales performance across your entire organization.
What is Sales Performance?
Sales performance is a measure of how effectively sales reps, teams, or organizations achieve goals.
Results are measured in new revenue, quota attainment, win rate, average deal size, and sales cycle length, as well as activities like calls, meetings, and pipeline growth.
Tracking sales performance helps businesses spot strengths, fix gaps in their sales process, coach reps, and forecast revenue more accurately.
What Does Good Sales Performance Look Like?
Good sales performance is clear when you see it: reps hit quotas, revenue is gained, and pipelines are healthy and moving.
The sales team is the front line of the company –interacting with prospective clients and maintaining client relations – that turns strategy into profit. When they're performing at their best, the entire organization benefits.
But the challenge is that sales teams are often pulled in too many directions. Non-selling activities chip away at the time reps should be spending with prospects and customers.
Strong sales performance means removing those barriers and giving your team the goals, incentives, and tools to focus on what moves the business forward.
14 Ways to Improve Sales Performance
If you're aiming to improve sales performance in your organization, here are 14 strategies you can use to increase it effectively:
1. Set SMART Goals
Vague goals produce vague results. High-performing sales teams set SMART goals to create clarity and accountability at every level. SMART stands for:
- Specific: Define exactly what you want to achieve.
- Measurable: Attach a number or metric to track progress.
- Achievable: Set ambitious but realistic targets.
- Relevant: Align goals to broader business objectives.
- Time-Bound: Anchor every goal to a firm deadline.
Instead of creating a sales goal such as "increase revenue," your sales goal should be something like, "Close 15 new enterprise accounts by Q4."
That second goal drives focused activity, better forecasting, and faster coaching conversations.
2. Make Customer Experience a Priority
One-third of customers will consider switching brands after a single poor service experience, which means successful companies have satisfied customers. And according to Bain & Company, a 5% increase in customer retention drives more than 25% profit growth.
That math matters in today's market where retaining a customer costs far less than winning a new one.
The companies that win long-term position themselves as partners, not vendors, significantly increase their sales performance.
3. Gain and Implement Customer Feedback
Your customers are one of your most valuable sources of sales intelligence. You should be using them to collect feedback that gives your team a better idea of what’s working.
However, once you get the feedback, you need to actually use it.
When insights are shared cross-functionally, you can sharpen messaging, improve the buyer experience, and help reps show up to every conversation better prepared.
4. Create a Positive Employee Experience
McKinsey's Great Resignation research found that 51% of employees who left did so because they didn't feel a sense of belonging. And other studies have similarly shown that positive sales rep attitudes can impact sales performance.
Think about how you can improve the employee experience. A few common practices include:
- Workplace flexibility (i.e., allowing employees to work from almost anywhere).
- Stipends to create productive, comfortable remote workspaces.
- Mental health days to promote employee wellness.
- Direct, clear communication with leadership and executives.
- Educational opportunities and training.
5. Align Incentives to Business Goals
Incentive compensation is indeed the main driver of sales behaviors. But getting it right is a critical step in improving your sales performance that many often forget to consider.
Your sales compensation incentives need to be aligned with overarching business and sales objectives. This ensures your sales team is targeting the right opportunities and prioritizing the best deals to reach your goals.
6. Use SPIFFs for Short-Term Pushes
If you're looking to accelerate end-of-quarter pipeline, promote a new product launch, or break into a new market segment, you can always use a SPIF to give reps an extra reason to prioritize the right opportunities.
When reps know exactly what to sell, why it matters, and how long the window is open, SPIFs can deliver results, fast.
Note: No two positions play the same role in closing deals. Creating incentives specific to each position is a great way to motivate sales reps and teams.
7. Optimize Your Sales Strategy & Process
Optimizing your sales strategy means looking at every stage of the funnel. Then, ask yourself the following questions:
- Where is time being lost?
- Where are the deals stalling?
- Where does your team have the greatest opportunity to improve?
When your strategy, process, and incentives are all pulling in the same direction, your sales performance does the same.
8. Increase Time Spent on Selling
The average-performing sales reps spend only about 24% of their time selling.
And although this may seem harmless on the surface, it adds up. It’s also a reason why a typical organization spends $1,500-3,500 per employee on sales training to improve sales productivity.
But once you know the cause, you can take steps to remove the roadblocks and get your sales teams back to selling.
9. Embrace AI In Sales
AI is becoming inescapable for sales teams. In fact, 93% already use AI within their sales performance management process. And those that do see an increase in overall speed and accuracy.
This goes to show one lesson: if you want your organization to retain a competitive edge, you need to use AI in a way that simplifies and enhances your sales planning process.
10. Use AI Sales Forecasting
Accurate sales forecasting is the backbone of efficient resource management, but manual processes make it harder than it needs to be.
AI sales forecasting closes that gap by analyzing your CRM data to surface where deals stall in your pipeline, flags opportunities at risk due to inactivity, and gives your team a clearer, more accurate picture of what's actually going to close.
Note: AI forecasting can also provide suggestions that help you coach reps in the moment and drive better outcomes across your entire sales organization.
11. Eliminate Errors Through Automation
Companies routinely overpay commissions due to spreadsheet errors and manual miscalculations, throwing money out the window year over year.
When salespeople can't rely on their commission statements, they resort to shadow accounting instead of selling.
To improve your sales performance, consider using a solution that eliminates these errors at the source to restore your sales reps' confidence in the business.
This helps them get back to doing what they should be doing instead: making sales and driving revenue.
12. Provide Consistent Sales Coaching
At its core, every business is a people business. Sales is no exception. Even the best strategy falls flat without the right coaching to back it up.
Organizations that invest in their reps' development build a culture that attracts and retains top performers, which becomes a critical advantage in an increasingly competitive hiring market.
The bottom line: when leaders empower their teams, everyone wins, and sales performance improves.
13. Equip Your Sales Team With Data
Sales leaders need access to performance data to truly understand the effectiveness of their sales plans and how they can drive performance and growth.
The visibility also helps teams prioritize (and convert) increased lead volumes by using the data as a benchmark. Without it, they’re not able to as quickly make the decisions that impact sales performance positively.
But with it, a good sales team can become an extraordinary sales team.
14. Use Revenue Intelligence, Sooner Rather Than Later
Revenue Intelligence replaces guesswork with data by analyzing performance trends, identifying your best revenue sources, and surfacing the insights that sharpen your sales strategy.
But the real impact shows up in your reps' outreach. When reps know which customers to target and which deals to prioritize, they spend less time chasing low-value opportunities and more time closing the ones that drive more revenue
The result is alignment between what's good for the rep and what's good for the business.
Sellers earn more, companies grow faster, and every decision is backed by intelligence rather than intuition. It becomes a win-win for everyone.
How Xactly Helps Improve Business Sales Performance
Xactly gives revenue leaders the tools to increase the performance of their sales reps and teams with AI-driven insights and actions. Built on 21+ years of unmatched proprietary benchmark data, the Intelligent Revenue Platform unifies territory, quota, incentives, and forecasting in a single system of action.
- Our sales planning software aligns territory, capacity, and quota plans to your go-to-market strategy before the first deal is even worked.
- The incentive management software automates incentive compensation with the accuracy and speed your sales team expects.
- The sales forecasting software replaces gut-feel pipeline calls with AI-powered revenue predictions.
Together, our products not only improve sales performance but enable you to orchestrate predictable revenue.
Increase Sales Performance Across Your Organization
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