Yes, You Need Sales Scorecards. Here’s How to Make Them Effective

Do you want to keep your sales reps motivated and on track? Of course, you do. That’s why, when it comes to sales scorecards, the question is how to make them effective, not whether you should have them.

A good sales scorecard can motivate your team, keep them accountable, and show your sales managers where they can improve processes. But if you want to maximize the value you get from sales scorecards, then you need to do more than the bare minimum.

In this article, we’ll show you how to take your scorecards to the next level and make them a truly effective sales enablement tool.

What is a sales scorecard?

A sales scorecard is a way to measure your rep’s sales performance and tie it back to your sales goals. You can think of it a bit like a performance dashboard. You see how well sales reps perform against their KPIs, celebrate their wins, and identify areas to improve.

Sales scorecards are a great way to hold your sales reps accountable while also gamifying their experience. What’s particularly good about sales scorecards is that they encourage reps to engage in healthy competition against themselves, rather than against their colleagues.

Sales scorecard vs. sales leaderboard

Sales leaderboards are commonplace in sales organizations that like to gamify the sales experience and put reps head-to-head against each other. These usually take the form of a communal digital dashboard that shows how well sales team members perform against several KPIs.

While a sales leaderboard sounds a heck of a lot like a sales scorecard, there are some key differences. Most importantly, sales scorecards only measure a rep’s individual performance and don't compare them to other team members. This makes sales scorecards much fairer, too. The problem with sales leaderboards is that reps may not be operating in the same target market. If one market is significantly harder to sell into than another, that rep will always be at the bottom of the leaderboard — even if they hit their sales targets.

By using a sales scorecard that only compares a rep’s performance against their own targets, you get a much fairer way of measuring how well each rep is doing. Of course, reps can still compare sales scorecards, but they’ll do so knowing their scores are calculated fairly.

Who should be responsible for the sales scorecard?

Most sales teams understandably default to putting the sales manager in charge of sales scorecards. Makes sense, right? After all, these are the people responsible for the performance and well-being of sales reps.

Not so fast.

The trouble with putting sales managers in charge is that they rarely have the time to check scores every week, let alone every day.

That’s why at TigerLRM, we recommend that a sales enablement professional deals with sales scorecards. Why? Because sales enablement professionals already handle the onboarding and training of sales reps. So if this person knows the sales process well enough to teach it, then they certainly know it well enough to monitor it and improve the performance of the people they’ve trained.

It’s why we’ve designed the TigerLRM platform to offer different views to different users. One of them, explicitly designed for the SE professional, lets them access sales rep scorecard data and easily spot areas where reps are missing the mark. They can issue a non-compliance notice (NCN) from within the platform to alert the salesperson to the issue and arrange for additional training if required.

We also understand that a lot of sales teams don’t have a sales enablement function in place. That’s why we provide a comprehensive sales enablement service that maximizes your sales efforts and brings measurable change to your sales processes. Our experts can take charge of onboarding and ongoing training, identifying the issues that sales scorecards flag and rectifying them on a one-to-one basis with individual reps.

Why you really need a sales scorecard

Think you don’t need to bother with sales scorecards? Think again. Here are four reasons we think they’re vital.

Keep reps accountable

Sales scorecards are one of the most effective ways to keep sales reps accountable. Because they provide a real-time measure of how effective each sales rep is, there’s simply no way of hiding. Either reps are hitting their targets, or they aren’t.

Gamify sales and increase employee engagement

Every sales rep performs better when they are having fun and they know what they are meant to be doing. A sales scorecard achieves both of these goals.

By providing them with a performance-based score, sales scorecards become an easy way to turn their job into a game and a way to measure how well they are playing. But they also provide clear direction, showing reps exactly what they should be doing day to day.

Identify areas for improvement

Sales scorecards are an excellent way to identify individual and group performance. Sales enablement professionals (or sales managers) can use scorecards to pinpoint exactly which parts of the sales process reps are struggling with. When everything is presented in black and white, there’s no second guessing.

They also help sales reps to improve without input from management. If any proactive rep wants to know where to focus their efforts, their sales scorecard is a great place to start.

Improve coaching

There’s no point using sales scorecards to identify areas for improvement if you aren’t going to use them to improve the way you train your sales reps. Again, sales scorecards can be used to show the individual sales tasks that reps need help with.

Once a sales enablement professional has identified a KPI that needs improving, they can monitor the sales rep carefully to see why they aren’t hitting their goals.

How to make your sales scorecards more effective

Whether you’ve never created a sales scorecard before or you already have sales dashboards set up, here’s how you can create the most effective sales scorecard possible.

Tie KPIs to company goals

There’s no shortage of key performance indicators (KPIs) you can track using a sales scorecard. What matters most is that they are relevant for your team and your company. Think about it — your company has specific goals, and there are specific actions reps should be taking to meet them. Tie your KPIs to those goals, and you’ll be a winner.

The first step, therefore, is to identify your sales objectives if you haven’t already. Next, choose metrics that are measurable, specific, and tied to your overall sales objectives. For example, if you want to target deals worth a certain value, it makes sense to track deal value as a KPI. Finally, think about the timeframe of your KPIs. Some (like phone calls made) are better measured weekly or daily. Others (like demos booked) are better measured every month or quarter.

If you’re stuck on what to track, here’s a list of example KPIs:

• Calls made
• Conversations
• Demos booked
• Contracts signed
• Deal value

Try to avoid choosing too many KPIs to measure. Your reps already have enough on their plate without trying to measure up against a dozen different metrics. We recommend choosing between one and three leading KPIs and a couple of lagging ones.

A leading indicator could be calls made or demos booked. A lagging indicator could be deals won or deal value. Remember, leading indicators look ahead to future outcomes, and lagging indicators look back to see the results achieved.

Back targets with data

Rather than setting targets arbitrarily, work backward from your sales data to ensure that your targets are realistic and achievable.

Let’s look at an example if you want to track the number of calls reps make. Start by combing through your sales data to find your conversion rate so you can work out the number of prospects that each rep needs to give a demo to in order to close a sale. Then work out the number of conversations reps have to book a demo and, finally, the number of calls they have to make to have a conversation.

If your conversion rate is 25%, then reps need to give four demos. If they need to speak to 5 people to book a single demo, then they need to have 20 conversations (5x4). And if they need to make 10 calls to have a single conversation, then they need to make 200 calls.

Weight targets

While you may value all of the KPIs your sales enablement professional sets, some are definitely going to matter more than others. As such, you need to provide a weight to each of those KPIs so that reps are held more accountable for meeting the most important targets.

In the example above, you can see that each sales activity gets more heavily weighted the nearer it gets to closing a deal. Sales calls only get a weight of two and have a much higher target. Conversations have a weighting of four, demos have a weighting of eight, and contracts have a weighting of 10.

This means that a sales rep who otherwise does a fantastic job of booking demos and sending out contracts isn’t unfairly punished for not making enough sales calls. They are a relatively minor sales activity, after all. And who cares if they aren’t making the target amount of calls if they are booking more than enough demos?

Personalize scorecards by role

The last thing you want to do is to find a sales scorecard template online and steal it without personalizing it for your business. Making it relevant for your company is essential for success. But consider going one step further and personalizing sales scorecards by each sales role in your organization.

Here’s the thing — the targets you set for sales development representatives are going to be different from account executives. And their goals are going to be different from sales managers.

One way to personalize a sales scorecard by role is to change the KPIs. Have sales development reps focus more on top-of-the-funnel metrics like calls made and meetings booked. Then provide deal-focused KPIs (like sales closed and deal value) for your account executives.

Another is to set bigger, more difficult targets for more experienced sales reps. Account executives and sales managers should be hitting bigger numbers than a first-year sales rep, and therefore their sales scorecards should reflect this.

Giving everyone access to sales scorecards

There’s no point in creating scorecards for your sales team if you aren’t going to make them easily accessible to everyone. Once created, these scorecards should be stored digitally in your CRM or sales enablement tool so that reps can quickly look up their scores (and those of their colleagues) and sales enablement professionals can identify areas for improvement.

If you’d rather keep sales scorecards private, then create several user levels with differing levels of access. For example, sales reps can only see their own scorecard, sales enablement reps can see the scorecards of everyone, and the VP of sales can only see team performance metrics.

Build a sales scorecard with TigerLRM

Having a sales scorecard can supercharge the performance of your sales team. But you need to make sure you have someone keeping a close eye on each rep’s performance if you want to make real change happen.

It’s why we believe sales enablement professionals should be the people in charge of your sales scorecards and why we provide a dedicated service to give overworked sales managers the resources their team needs to succeed.

Find out more about how our sales enablement professionals can build sales scorecards and transform your sales processes.