Actually, Your Salespeople May Want More KPIs

Tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can be a salesperson’s worst nightmare. Why should they have to meet arbitrary goals as long as they’re making the sales you hired them to make? This is especially painful when the KPIs don’t seem connected to outcomes.

KPIs can become a tug of war: Between a manager and their team, or between the company leadership and the sales department on the whole.

The traditional view of salespeople is that they are individualistic heroes. Hunters who go out seeking the big wins and don’t want anyone telling them how to do it. So, it’s easy to see how you might think that most salespeople would prefer not to be ruled by metrics other than their raw sales numbers.

But that’s wrong. As a company leading the charge to elevate the sales profession, we spend a lot of time listening to actual salespeople to hear what they need to do their jobs better. And what do they tell us?

They want MORE KPIs. But that comes with a caveat: Not just any KPIs.

Why Salespeople Want More KPIs

When we work with salespeople to find out what we can do better with our platform, they tell us they love how Membrain sets up and tracks KPIs. But they want more. They want to be able to set their own KPIs, according to their own way of working and what matters to them.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We already know that people perform better when driven by intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivation. They work harder, faster, and better.

• Extrinsic motivation: Striving toward external rewards, such as commissions, recognition, or a promotion
• Intrinsic motivation: Striving for internal reasons, such as a desire for a better life, to make a difference, or to achieve personal goals

This is all great to know and incredibly valuable. But the trouble is, it’s tricky to activate intrinsic motivation. You can’t just apply a one-size-fits-all rewards system and call it a day.

You have to get to know your people, understand what matters to each one, and tie their performance to their intrinsic needs.

This requires excellent coaching.

And a platform that rewards them the way they want to be rewarded.

Enter the “supporting goals.”

How to Give Salespeople the KPIs They Actually Want

Once we realized that salespeople were asking for more KPIs and more control over those KPIs, we built that capability directly into our platform. In our upcoming release of the coaching cockpit, there’s a feature that allows salespeople to write their own KPIs and track them within the platform. We call them “supporting goals.”

If you want to give your salespeople the boost of measuring their own intrinsic motivations, we’ve got the tool you need. You also need to invest in good coaching. Your managers need to help salespeople understand for themselves what motivates them so they know what to track. And then help them set up a system that rewards them the way they want to be rewarded.

I can’t wait to show you how our platform supports this when we roll out our coaching cockpit later this year. Stay tuned and in the meantime, tell me: What are you doing to leverage intrinsic motivation on your sales team?