Harvard Business Review (HBR) appears to be running a series of items on their blog about sales and selling. This week they write about the importance of putting sales at the heart of the business and that CEO’s who do out perform their peers in company growth terms by between 50 and 80 percent.

What I like most about this item is that it argues the need for analytics about sales, clear KPI’s and accountability. This sounds obvious but I meet plenty of organisations that don’t know where to start when measuring the performance of sales people. That is a recipe disaster given that the people they are trying to evaluate are capable, in some way, of selling them a story about performance that may be only partially accurate.

I came across a great company a few years back run by Juliette Denny called Growth Engineering that specialised in measurement of sales teams. She argued for activity measures when looking at sales teams because they were the upstream, key performance indicators of financial success downstream. Given the B2B sales cycle can be 3 to 9 months this makes perfect sense, especially when hiring a new sales person.

The article goes on to talk about ‘lean sales teams’ in essence stripping back the non-sales activities from front line sales staff. Obvious of course but so few companies actually do it. And finally making sales a ‘team sport’ which in almost every situation it is – and that doesn’t mean the sales person isn’t performing because they need help!