How to Create a Sales Scorecard – The Sales Leaders Guide
We all love data. And lately, it feels like there's an app to track everything. As humans, we are continually seeking opportunities to know how we are doing and how we could be doing better. It's no different in sales. Creating a sales scorecard for your team gives them the performance information and feedback they crave.
What is a sales scorecard?
A sales scorecard is a way to track your reps' performance and tie it specifically to the team’s development and goals. It gives you a method of tracking your teams' historical results and measuring your progress towards improvement.
Sales scorecards are excellent for keeping team members accountable, noting and rewarding top performers, and gamifying your processes to create healthy competition.
Research shows that people who regularly create and maintain goals are much more likely to achieve them. Beyond that, tracking sales activities leads to higher sales team performance.
An excellent scorecard empowers reps to know where they stand against their own and your team's goals and what they need to do to exceed them. This blog post will guide you through the four steps to make a legendary sales scorecard.
Select your metrics
Metrics are different for every company, but the one thing they all have in common is they drive your performance. Make sure whatever you select for your scorecard is meaningful for your team, and that each role on your team has a scorecard that reflects their performance.
Here are some questions to ask yourself when trying to determine which metrics to use:
- How are our reps performing? At their current pace, will they hit their goals?
- Is our team regularly improving their processes and performance?
- How are top performers closing sales?
- What are we doing to improve sales opportunities?
- Do we generate enough leads?
- Are we qualifying leads well?
From there, determine metrics you can include on your scorecards to help you answer these questions moving forward. Try to choose three leading indicators, one lagging indicator, as well as indicators of both quality and quantity to ensure a well-rounded report.
For leading indicators, you might select something like leads or conversations. Whereas lagging indicators may be opportunities won or lost. The leading indicators funnel upwards to the lagging indicators, and both are important for indicating future and current health for your team.
For instance, a scorecard for someone in sales development (BDR) might include call volume numbers and sales accepted opportunities. On the flip side, an account executive (AE) scorecard might consist of meetings, demos, or closed-won.
Calculate the goals
Don't set your goals arbitrarily. Take numbers you already know and work back from them. For instance, if one of your metrics is the number of calls, take your company KPIs that involve calls and track backward.
Say your goal for the quarter is $10 million, and the average deal size for your team is $1 million. To hit that number, your team will need to close ten deals. If your team closes about a quarter of proposals they send out, that means you'll need to send 40 proposals to hit your goal.
To take it further, if you know one out of five prospects gets to the proposal stage, that means you need 200 prospects in the quarter. If you also know every ten phone calls results in one meeting with a prospect, then to hit your goals, your reps should make 2,000 calls this quarter. That's one of the bottom-level goals that you should set for your team.
From there, you just need to determine how to slice it across roles. For instance, some metrics should roll up to your managerial team. If you have ten reps, they should each be making 200 calls per quarter. If each sales manager is responsible for five reps, they should have 1000 calls per quarter on their scorecard.
Setting realistic goals helps your team feel fulfilled in their accomplishments and know precisely where they should be focussing their efforts.
Determine their weights
Not all metrics are created equal—some of the things on your scorecard will be more valuable than others. Consider these metrics from an example sales team. For this team:
- It takes 50 sales activities to generate a call.
- 75% of those qualification calls turn into demos.
- 80% of those demos turn into opportunities
As the last piece of the sales funnel, opportunities should be the starting consideration for weights and be weighted most heavily. In this example, we'll give 10 points for opening an opportunity. From there, we move on to the point count for demos.
We know 80% of demos convert to opps, so we'll give 80% of the points we'd give to an opp for a demo. So, each demo is worth 8 points. We do the same calculations for qual calls, which end up being worth 6 points, and then activities, which end up being 1.2 points each.
| Action | Value | Number | Goal & Actual |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opened Opps | 10 | 3 | |
| Demos | 8 | 10 | |
| Qual Calls | 6 | 10 | |
| Activities | 12 | 30 | 250/206 |
In the above example, we’ve set the goal number to 250, to make up for the general amount of activities that it would take to close 5 sales.
You already have the breakdown of your metrics and how much you need to hit to succeed. Use the rubric to calculate weights that make the most sense for your team. The more tied to reality your goals and weights are, the more meaningful and driving they'll be for your team.
Track it
One of the most significant benefits of having a sales scorecard is gamification amongst your team members. Create a place where scorecards are readily available and up-to-date to encourage healthy competition. There are a few places where your scorecards could live:
- Google Drive
- Excel
- Salesforce or another CRM
- A Sales Activity Management System
- Looker
- A custom-built dashboard
Scorecards also let everyone see who's in the lead, thus giving people a direct map to who they should be talking to about strategies to improve their performance.
If creating a team-wide scorecard doesn't fit with your culture, consider creating a template for reps to copy and modify themselves that you review in each one-on-one or check-in meeting. Having the card be uniform across all reps makes it easier for you and your managers to understand essential insights quickly.
No matter which method you choose, ensure the way that you're building your scorecards allows for ways for your reps to:
- Compare their performance to their past performance.
- Show their trends and growth over time.
- Encourage regular and easy review—otherwise, it's all for naught.
Make your sales scorecard yours
You can find and use all the templates you want, but a scorecard will be more meaningful if it is custom-fit to your team. Determine metrics that are meaningful for each of the functions on your team.
Calculate goals that funnel up to those metrics in ways that are both qualitative and quantitative. Finding a balance between leading and lagging indicators also gives you a much more full picture of the team's overall performance.
Lastly, pick a place to host the cards that makes sense for your team. Most of all, listen to your team's needs and wants, and you'll be in a good place.
