What is Your Sales Management Control Focus?

Ensuring Alignment of Your Performance Management Methods with Your Business Strategy

When it comes to managing sales performance, two schools of thought persist:

1. Manage team behavior (inputs) and the results will follow
2. Manage results (outputs) and allow individuals to determine their own path to reach the desired outcomes

Which type of “control focus” will ensure strategy translation and optimize results? The answer is, “It depends.”

Determining the ideal performance control focus for your team is relative to a number of factors such as your organizational culture, the nature of your offering, your unique “value proposition”, your “competitive positioning”, your market environment and the experience level of your team,

When to Focus on Managing Inputs

Focusing on team and individual behavior is ideal in situations where:

• You desire to establish a competitive differentiator based on the professionalism and behavior of your front-line team
• You have a complex offering which requires some degree of compliance to an established process
• You’re dealing with an inexperienced team
• Your sales are high-risk, such as insurance or pharmaceuticals

When to Focus on Managing Outputs

Focusing on team and individual results is ideal in situations where:

• You’re dealing with an experienced team
• Your offering is straightforward
• You wish to promote a culture of entrepreneurism
• There is a high degree of diversity in your market and customers

Share your insights on optimizing performance by commenting below. Are you input or output focused . . .  and why?

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