Here’s a powerful sales building trio

According to Nucleus Research the combination of customer relationship management, social collaboration and performance management systems can enable sales organisations to boost closure rates by as much as 15 percent.

Nucleus says that two main forces are changing the future of sales performance management: the next generation of sales force automation (SFA) applications is driving greater adoption and more entry of data into SFA systems and there is rising awareness of the potential benefits of social performance management, particularly for the millennials entering the work force.

It argues that these two forces are creating new opportunities for sales managers to increase their productivity, scale their reach and drive a higher level of sales performance across diverse teams. “The most successful sales managers in the future are taking advantage of these capabilities to coach within context, provide more consistent recognition, and automate many tactical sales performance tasks so they can focus on strategic management and coaching.”

Next-generation sales performance management system “enable managers to set event-based alerts so they can be more proactive in their coaching, more systematic in their recognition, and more able to correct bad sales behaviour at the time of action − rather than pointing it out after the fact.”

The joining of performance management and CRM within the same application “enables managers to easily follow sales activities, identify performance problems, and tactically address them as they occur to drive incremental improvements in sales performance.”

Nucleus says it has found that when sales performance management is integrated CRM and includes social capabilities for coaching, recognition and correction it can accelerate sales onboarding by 50 to 75 percent.

However, Nucleus claims that the greatest impact of future sales performance management capabilities comes from their ability to “enable managers to better manage the tactical and strategic demands of their jobs so they can free up time for strategic thinking and higher-level coaching.”

Nucleus claims to have found that managers adopting social sales performance management integrated with CRM can reduce day-to-day time spent on tactical management by 75 percent.

The bottom line, according to Nucleus, is that the marriage of social collaboration, CRM and performance management systems can increase close rates by as much as 10 to 15 percent. “The marriage of social collaboration, CRM and performance management presents new opportunities for great sales managers to scale their skills more effectively, and for good sales managers to become better by having a more methodical approach to tactical sales management,” it concludes.

“In an increasingly challenging sales environment, even marginal improvements in sales management can have a measurable impact on top-line sales and bottom-line costs such as sales turnover transitioning and onboarding. Sales managers can likely justify the investment in social sales performance management based on their increased productivity alone. As more companies adopt social, integrated sales performance management, those that don’t will be at a competitive disadvantage.”