Sales benchmarking is a sales management process used to compare a company’s sales force against other companies or against industry performance. The purpose is to identify opportunities to improve performance and to focus the efforts of a sales organization.
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Similarities to process benchmarking
Like process benchmarking, a company will compare itself against other companies that are in similar industries or circumstances. The benchmarking process is also similar. Companies identify metrics, collect internal data, find external data sources, and compare their performance.
Differences from process benchmarking
Process benchmarking has most frequently been used to compare financial, manufacturing, or other operating metrics and processes. But even though customer relationship management (CRM) systems have expanded the raw data available to sales organizations, many sales organizations have not created consistent metrics or a way of organizing their performance data. Sales benchmarking has several key challenges:
- Choosing the right metrics is essential to identifying real problems, and focusing efforts to create improvement.
- Data in many CRM implementations is not accurate, so it may be necessary to scrub the internal data to get valid results.
- Many companies are sensitive to sharing their sales data, so finding external data can be challenging.
Sales benchmarking programs
There are a small number of commercial sales benchmarking programs available for executives to benchmark their sales investments and/or strategies. Of these, only a fraction have a track record of successfully supporting Global 2000 companies. Sales benchmarking programs are designed to deliver data and insights into the processes and practices that drive improvements within the sales organization. Firms who provide such programs may have the qualifications to identify and scale areas of strength as well as diagnose and correct areas of under-performance. Appropriate comparison sets and a proven methodology are all critical factors to consider when selecting a third party partner for any sales benchmarking initiative. All reputable programs will keep clients' data confidential and the benchmarks will be based on aggregate findings.
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