Sales benchmarking

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.

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.

ee also

* Benchmarking
* Sales

References

* [http://www.salestrainingsystems.co.uk/tools/sales_benchmarking.html Sales Benchmarking Example]
* [http://www.sfeba.com/ Sales Force Effectiveness Benchmarking Association]