Automate Your Way to a High-Performance Sales Culture

Effective communication and attainable goals are important to fostering a company culture of exceptional performance, but the data shows another element if crucial: automated activity and performance data collection, reporting, and analysis. According to Aberdeen’s October 2012 Learning and Performance Survey, best-in-class companies have highly automated systems for reporting on employee’s activity as well as for recognizing and rewarding high performers.
For the purpose of this study, a best-in-class company is defined as one that has achieved 92% of its organizational goals in the last year; has ready and willing successors identified for 82% of its key roles; and where 74% of employees exceed performance goals.
Who wouldn’t want that for their business?

The results of the research can be broken down into three key characteristics of these best-in-class companies:
1) Aligning individual goals with overall organizational goals
This requires clear connections, attached to numbers whenever possible, between how an individual agent’s success helps the company as a whole succeed. High-performing agents, and increasingly the next generation of sales agents, are strongly motivated by feeling they are an important contributor to the overall success of the company.
2) Clear and frequent communication of goals between agents and managers
When employees and managers both understand and agree to performance goals ahead of time, companies as a whole achieve almost 15% more of their organizational goals. They also as much as a 10% increase in employee engagement. Perhaps most significantly, they see a full 20% more of the employees exceeding their performance expectations.
3) Accurate reporting tools that allow data to drive communication
Best-in-class companies are more than twice as likely to have automated performance management systems in place and use them to gain visibility into progress toward a goal at the level of each agent, their team, or across the enterprise.

The automated aspect of those systems is critical: 67% of the best-in-class organizations surveyed reported that employee performance management is fully or at least partially automated, and the data showed automation doubled the year-over-year revenue gains per full-time equivalent employee.

Automated reporting and analysis also contributed to greater employee retention: companies retain the best talent when those high performers know they are noticed, appreciated, and contributing to the bottom line.

The basis for fostering these characteristics at any organization, no matter how many offices it has or where its agents and teams are located, is Gryphon’s cloud-based sales intelligence tool. Our reporting and analytics features exist in the path of every call your agents make, creating a real-time record of activity data that drives a robust sales intelligence reporting engine.