March 4, 2021
Sales in 2021 – Planning & Performance Management

Sales in 2021 – Planning & Performance Management
Sales in 2021 – Planning & Performance Management

The way customers have changed over the last 20 years has been one of the most exciting and challenging periods. The change has been very profound, buyers have instant and phenomenal information available on the market, product, or service. Moreover, they have an incredible amount of data solely off user reviews. Before a buyer interacts with a sales rep, 50-90% of the sales journey has already been completed.

It’s obvious that the world of sales is constantly evolving at a break-neck speed so sales must be extremely strategic as to what they bring to the table. However, across industries, sales conversions stand at only 2.46% - 3.26% . This is usually because the sales team in most industries are distributed. Adding on to the woes, 20% of sales teams don’t have the necessary resources that could help them reinforce their workflow. Moreover, today’s expanded work-from-home environment is creating a level of opaqueness. Only one-third of sales agents can be productive, enter data, report generation, and scheduling.

All of this is happening because many are trying to implement newer strategies with old platforms that only have sales CRM as a key feature. The newer cloud-based platforms are more flexible, faster, and offer predictive growth! The advantages are endless, some noteworthy leaders in these platforms are Oracle, Salesforce, Zoho, Freshsales and Hubspot.


Need for a Feature-Rich Platform

Of course, sales is more than just a numbers game. Hence, sales management platforms should have the main objective of making it easy to reliably predict and gain deeper insights into opportunities. So, here are a list of key features that are a must for any Sales teams in 2021.

Sales Force Automation (SFA) – To manage sales teams and to manage the routine sales activities to become more efficient, sales management teams must use sales force automation software. On an average, two-thirds of a sales rep’s time is spent on non-revenue and administrative tasks. The SFA’s sole purpose is to streamline the sales process so that you always use the most effective strategy, get deeper insights, and become highly productive. Check out top 10 tools!

Sales Performance Management (SPM) – There is a need for a strategy for monitoring and directing sales employees by encouraging them to develop their ability to sell products or services with deeper and clear insights into sales quotas, territories, bonus opportunities, and forecasting. The main purpose is to inform and inspire salespeople to set goals and satisfy customers. Here is the SPM buyer's guide,market (2020-2025) overview and top SPM tools.

Channel Management – The main objective of any business is to develop a better connection between the customer and the product. Channel Management software helps businesses streamline their delivery and sales activities by grouping clients into unique segments, keeping track of marketing outreach, and purchasing trends. Here is a guide to nail down channel management.

Customer Data Management (CDM) – There is a need to gather, manage, and analyze customer data to form a cohesive view of each customer from different sources. The aim of CDM is to efficiently deliver special, personalized, real-time, and channel agnostic CX. CDM needs to be a top priority because the focus has shifted from persona-based to PII driven personalization, ad tech driven to martech driven customization and omni-channel space needs more of data integration. Here are some popular CDM platforms and 2021 best practices.


Sales Performance Management 2021

The global market size of Sales Performance Management will be $14 Billion by 2027 from $4. 7 Billion in 2020 . The increasing need for accurate measurement in a highly unpredictable environment is driving the market growth. Companies are requesting a scalable, personalized, and streamlined framework to handle and provide analytics based on their sales results, which will fuel market growth in the next six years.



"If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail" – Benjamin Franklin



2021 SPM Challenges

Just 48% of decisions are based on trusted data, and the remaining 52% are based on pure chance or gut feelings of the sales personnel because of the following challenges: