Are you always struggling to hit your sales targets? Is there a way to get the team to work smarter and more effectively? Changing focus from sales activity to sales effectiveness is clearly a winning strategy to increase sales performance.

Sales managers know that there has been a dramatic shift in the way buyers perceive and interact with sales people. The Harvard Business Review said it themselves – it’s “the End of Solution Sales.” Hopefully, you have adjusted your sales process and strategy accordingly to ensure your team’s success. If not, that may explain why your sales performance has been suffering. Luckily, a sales scorecard can help you determine the root of the decline of your sales performance – if it’s done right.  Before you leave to find your sales scorecard, here are some tips on what to look for so that you can get the most out of your scorecard results.

If your organization's sales quotas are based on past sales, forecasting, and growth targets that can realistically be met, your sales reps have few reasons for not hitting quota and what reasons there are can be solved. The key is uncovering the reasons that your sales reps are not hitting quota so that you can take corrective action to close the difference between quota and results as quickly as possible. Following you will find three common reasons for sales reps not hitting quota that are frequently behind quota shortfalls.

Building a robust sales pipeline is essential to the success of your sales team. No matter how good your product is, or how effective your sales team is at closing deals, a weak or under-developed pipeline will prevent your numbers from being anywhere close to where they need to be. During the discovery process, your sales team uncovers key information that helps the rep determine the most appropriate strategy to move the lead through the pipeline (see: How to Improve Sales Discovery on the First Call). Sales management is limited to the rep’s subjective assessment of the probability of the opportunity closing and quite often this estimate is wrong. There is a process that will increase the accuracy of your pipeline forecasting.

At first glance, it may seem like cleaning out your sales pipeline is a bad idea. After all, the ultimate goal of pipeline management is to maximize your company's sales effectiveness by closing as many deals as possible. However, for most businesses, it is better to focus attention on qualified leads than it is too spread your sales team's attention too thin nurturing leads that are not as likely to end in a sale.

The sales pipeline at any organization generally follows a typical, linear route of leads and calls, meetings and discovery sessions, opportunity analysis and proposals, and finally closed sales. While organizations may feel their pipelines are unique to their business, they all tend to follow this general model of linear progression through the pipeline, fuelled by your team’s sales skills and process. However, when most sales managers are interviewed on the effectiveness of the process to increase sales, many often complain about less than stellar conversion rates and an overtaxed, underperforming sales team. They simply don’t have enough resources or enough time to get everything done, and sales results suffer. When analyzed further, most lack one critical component that would augment success - automated lead nurturing.

The relationship between sales people and their prospects has never been more important for creating new business, which means that lead nurturing to strengthen relationships with prospective clients should be front and center for sales people looking to increase sales. As better ways of automating this nurturing are becoming available, more sales people are realizing that nurturing leads does not need to be as time consuming as it once was. This may leave sales people who are not adopting workable nurturing processes at a competitive disadvantage. Following are three ways to make lead nurturing easier and more effective without detracting needed time from other important sales tasks.

Better leads can generate more business with less effort on your part as they are more highly qualified, ready to buy, and receptive to your sales approach. Recognizing that not all leads are created equal can help sales people focus their sales effort on the leads that are most likely to provide a return on the investment laid out to generate and cultivate those leads. Once a pipeline that generates more and better leads has been built, you can maximize your sales effort to create a consistent flow of new business.

To achieve top results in sales you should be doing all you can to make meaningful connections with your leads. This includes lead nurturing from the moment a lead enters the sales pipeline so that you can create value that culminates in sales, while ensuring that time spent in lead nurturing is efficient. Following are three reasons why lead nurturing is essential to building lasting customer value and an expanding sales base.

Gone are the days when simply qualifying a prospect was enough; now sales people must be much more sophisticated to move the lead through the early stages of sales cycle. If your sales people are not qualifying sales leads effectively, time and sales are being lost. Following are three reasons why your sales people might not be effectively qualifying their leads and suggestions for how to remedy the cause.