Sales performance reviews assist sales managers in evaluating each sales representative’s performance against predetermined key metrics like sales quota attainment. Utilizing pre-made sales performance review templates can help you conduct equitable comparisons among team members and enable objective measurement of their performance. Employ more productive reps in your team by exploring how to create sales performance review templates in this guide.
General Use Sales Performance Review Template
While sales performance reviews vary by role, you can use a general format to input specific sales activities and competencies. Get started by downloading our free general use performance review template to streamline sales metric monitoring for your sales team.
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Your sales performance review template is on the way! If you don’t see it, check your “Spam” or “Promotions” folders.
💡 Quick Tip:
Use customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot to generate reports of individual and team sales activity, then use that data in your sales performance reviews to evaluate performance.
Sales Performance Review Example Templates
Want a free sales team performance review template but don’t know where to start? Here are some sales performance review examples you can use as templates for three common sales job functions: inside sales, outside sales, and customer service and account management. Use them as your reference for sales performance management to get the most out of your sales team.
Inside Sales Performance Review
This sales employee performance review template is for sales development reps (SDRs) or equivalent positions tasked with responsibilities early in the stages of the sales pipeline, such as prospect research, lead generation, and making initial introductions. Depending on how your sales operation is structured, you might have these individuals handle lead qualification and nurturing as well.
Thank you for downloading!
Your sales performance review template is on the way! If you don’t see it, check your “Spam” or “Promotions” folders.
💡 Quick Tip:
Use customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot to generate reports of individual and team sales activity, then use that data in your sales performance reviews to evaluate performance.
Outside Sales Performance Review
This sales employee performance review template is for account executives, outside sales reps, or any similar position responsible for the stages later in the sales pipeline. These activities include lead qualification, nurturing, sales presentations, product demonstrations, sending proposals and quotes, and closing deals. Because this position is responsible for more client and lead-facing activities, they are measured on the direct production of revenue and deals.
Thank you for downloading!
Your sales performance review template is on the way! If you don’t see it, check your “Spam” or “Promotions” folders.
💡 Quick Tip:
Use customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot to generate reports of individual and team sales activity, then use that data in your sales performance reviews to evaluate performance.
Customer Service and Account Management Performance Review
This sales performance review example is for customer service reps and account managers who handle clients and customers after the sales process is completed. Their priority is customer satisfaction, which in turn, results in customer retention. They also often attempt to generate additional revenue through upselling or cross-selling activities.
Thank you for downloading!
Your sales performance review template is on the way! If you don’t see it, check your “Spam” or “Promotions” folders.
💡 Quick Tip:
Use customer relationship management (CRM) software like HubSpot to generate reports of individual and team sales activity, then use that data in your sales performance reviews to evaluate performance.
Benefits of Sales Performance Review Templates
Monitoring sales performance is one of many crucial aspects of sales management. Sales team performance review templates can help you save plenty of time, effort, and resources monitoring and coaching your sales reps. Below are the other benefits of using a sales staff performance review template in your sales operations.
About 47% of sales representatives leave their job due to poor training. With dedicated performance review templates, executives and managers can quickly assess salespeople’s performance. This enables them to obtain performance data that can be used for onboarding and training program development to increase the number of high-performing reps in the team.
Sales staff performance review templates are essential for creating sales compensation plans that appropriately reward sales reps for their contributions to closing deals and generating revenue. 44% of sales representatives prefer a salary, commission, and bonus plan. With this in mind, executives and sales managers can develop the best compensation plans based on data gathered during sales performance reviews.
When sales managers have accurate insights into the factors that increase or decrease a sales rep’s performance, they can develop the best sales compensation plans to motivate and generate high-performing reps. Furthermore, business executives can strike a good balance between incentivizing reps and keeping the profits satisfying.
Sales performance reviews and customer satisfaction are directly related. About 79% of organizations acknowledge the importance of strategic agent management. Using the right agent performance tools leads to better customer experiences, increased customer retention, and higher profitability.
As you monitor customer analytics, you’ll notice that customers handled by high-performing reps are likely to express their utmost satisfaction on surveys. Sales performance review templates can help sales team leaders quickly determine what metrics their reps are failing. From this, leaders can gain insightful data that can help inform their sales and service strategies and make more customers happy.
A study shows that about $8.9 trillion is lost in gross domestic product (GDP) due to low employee engagement worldwide. A crucial aspect of employee engagement is coaching. Sales managers can leverage sales performance review templates to reduce time creating one from scratch and coach more reps in a day or week.
When reps are regularly made aware of their performance progress, they become more motivated to work harder to reach their quotas. As a result, the company benefits from having more high-performing sales reps, boosting revenue growth.
How to Create a Sales Performance Review Template
As part of sales performance management and getting the most out of your team, conducting a thorough individual rep performance review is necessary for proper feedback and behavior reinforcement. A standardized template for your small business helps managers ensure fair evaluation of your sales reps during sales performance reviews.
Here’s how to create a sales performance review template in five easy steps:
Step 1: Identify Employee and Review Purpose Information
First, create a document with a data field or section identifying the employee being evaluated, the manager conducting the evaluation, and any other party involved, like the sales rep’s team leader. Before each assessment, enter the complete name of the rep going through the review and their job title. Repeat this process on a new template for each employee to be evaluated.
You can also specify the scope of the review for in-depth guidance. For example, if you conduct quarterly assessments, you can indicate at the top of the sales rep performance review template:
Step 2: Organize Sales Goals and Achievements
Next, set your sales goals, achievements, production, or activity for sales performance evaluation. While some sections will be universal for most of the sales positions, such as revenue generated or deals closed, certain industries may have unique evaluation requirements. For instance, companies in the software industry usually review the number of product demos completed by a rep during the quarter.
Furthermore, consider the rep’s job title and responsibilities for each review. Inside sales positions, for example, focus more on prospecting activities like cold calling or researching leads and should be evaluated for that type of work. On the other hand, outside sales reps like account executives conduct more client-facing and deal-closing work. With that in mind, create a different performance review template for each role, since the responsibilities differ.
Zoho CRM’s sales dashboard shows key metrics indicators. (Source: Zoho CRM)
When reviewing sales performance, consider both effort and skills demonstrated. Let’s say you are assessing a sales rep’s performance in converting cold leads to interested prospects. You can evaluate their effort by determining the number of attempts they made through cold calling or email introductions and evaluating their skills by the total conversion rate.
Step 3: Include Miscellaneous Attributes
In addition to sales-related performance metrics, include some of the non-measurables related to each team member’s job on your template. Overall professionalism by showing up on time and working well with others are good examples of these attributes. Additionally, you can consider a rep’s eagerness to learn, improve, and demonstrate a positive attitude.
If a sales manager asks a sales rep to complete projects or other non-sales tasks, make sure you give them relevant feedback. In this section, use a qualitative rating factor scale that’s converted to a numeric system since it’s difficult to measure these quantitatively. For instance, you could have four categories:
- Exceeds Expectations
- Meets Expectations
- Doesn’t Meet Expectations
- Needs Significant Improvement
You then assign points for each one. For example, you can give four points for “Exceeds Expectations,” three for “Meets Expectations,” two for “Doesn’t Meet Expectations,” and one for “Needs Significant Improvement.”
Step 4: Format Tables in Your Review Template
As you insert sales activities and non-sales tasks for review, create a table and organize the sections appropriately. Each activity, production metric, and performance attribute should be listed vertically down the list of your sales rep performance review template, with performance rating or categories sections next to it like the example below:
Step 5: Provide Feedback, Ratings & Explanations
Once your sales team performance review template is created, you can start performance evaluations. For any sales-related metrics, we recommend using customer relationship management (CRM) software to track individual activity and production. For instance, HubSpot CRM lets managers generate reports and view dashboards for individual sales activities, like calls placed or booked appointments, and production metrics like deals closed.
HubSpot’s sales activity report on target accounts (Source: HubSpot)
Sales managers should always use their best judgment to provide adequate feedback and continually evaluate company culture fit. Consider the rep’s attitude in the workplace and if they’ve had any issues getting along with their peers, prospects, or customers. Also, gauge their professionalism to see if they’re showing up on time and consistently taking initiative.
Complement the performance review template by having a one-on-one meeting with each rep to go over their performance and address any questions or concerns. For negative feedback, provide a plan of action to get them on track to meet or exceed the performance expectations for the next time period. Also, sales enablement solutions can help resolve performance issues.
Software Tools for Sales Performance Reviews
In addition to our sales performance review examples, there are several software tools that those in sales management positions can use to help with sales performance reviews. From gamification to data tracking to coaching features, these tools give you and your employees an extra performance bump.
1. LevelEleven
LevelEleven is a motivation tool to help drive behaviors using scorecards, broadcast leaderboards, and real-time data to track and coach new business sales and customer retention. In addition to the performance management and coaching features, you can use the gamification tools to set up friendly sales competitions between your reps.
LevelEleven gamification feature (Source: Comparecamp.com)
2. Ambition
Ambition is a performance management tool that focuses on coaching, performance tracking, and sales gamification. It ensures data-driven consistency in one-on-one reviews and teaching sessions, allows customizable metric tracking for individual users, and fosters a dynamic environment through gamification modes and friendly sales competitions.
Ambition activity scoring for coaching (Source: Ambition)
3. Xactly Incent
Xactly Incent is a full sales management platform with features for performance management, strategic planning, compensation management, and revenue analytics. The performance management software is designed to help automate and collaborate on performance review activities while using real-time data to find insights.
Xactly Incent sales rep performance dashboard (Source: Software Advice)
4. ElevateHQ
ElevateHQ is a web-based sales enablement tool with automation capabilities to streamline sales activities, including performance monitoring. In the dashboard, your reps can see how close they are to attaining their sales goals. Moreover, sales leaders can use the custom designer to create incentive programs to motivate their sales reps to exceed their quotas.
ElevateHQ quota management dashboard (Source: ElevateHQ)
5. Oracle Sales Performance Management
Oracle sales performance management is equipped with advanced tools that can be used for sales performance reviews, including quota management, territory management, and sales compensation. With machine learning and accurate data, the provider promises sales teams to have complete visibility into current progress and historical data to attain sales success.
Oracle Sales Performance Management’s dashboard shows team key performance metrics. (Source: Oracle Sales Performance Management)
Sales Performance Review Statistics
Now that you have sales performance review template samples, learn how others feel about job evaluations by checking out these statistics to get the full story:
Millennials are feedback-driven and will represent 75% of the global workforce by 2025.
Takeaway: Sales managers must conduct performance reviews regularly and provide feedback on how reps can attain their quotas and other key metrics. Data-driven coaching provides sales managers and reps with valuable insights from performance data to make more informed decisions, such as determining the best time to schedule a product demo or a house visit.
Effectively coached sales teams can reach more than 75% of their quotas.
Takeaway: Sales performance reviews complemented with regular coaching sessions can help improve sales rep productivity and goal attainment, like meeting or exceeding their sales quotas. As the executive or sales manager in your organization, ensure you have dedicated time to monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs) at both team and individual sales rep levels.
32% of the workforce report below-average performance levels.
Takeaway: Sales leaders can motivate disengaged reps to excel in their roles by acknowledging their strengths or simply praising a job well done. Words can be a powerful performance booster, especially when backed up by data, which sales managers can present to reps during sales performance reviews.
45% of employees feel emotionally drained from their work.
Takeaway: Sales reps may experience burnout because of the nature of work they face every day. This can negatively affect their performance. With performance reviews, sales managers and reps can connect on a deeper level to understand the internal and external factors that impact their performance.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
The first step in writing a sales performance review is gathering accurate information about your key performance indicators (KPIs) on your analytics dashboard. Next, compare historical and current performance by selecting your desired date range and analyze if the results meet the KPIs and your overall sales goals. Use sales team performance review templates to streamline this process so you can focus more on providing feedback to individual sales reps.
Evaluating a sales rep’s performance involves comparing and aligning current metrics to existing goals. Aside from quantitative data analysis, sales managers must also assess qualitative metrics like job role expectations and employee experiences. Considering all factors contributing to sales performance results in improving your overall sales operations.
A monthly review is ideal if you aim to check a rep’s skills and the effectiveness of sales activities. If you want to determine the overall impact of your sales training, coaching, and sales compensation planning efforts, a quarterly or yearly review is highly recommended. Generally, the frequency of sales performance reviews depends on your market and company growth.
Bottom Line
Sales performance review templates streamline the job evaluation process and keep it fair and consistent. With our sales performance review template samples and software tools, you can create review templates that track all aspects of your sales teams’ job performance, pinpoint areas that need improvement, praise and reward high performance, and construct a plan of action to get each team member on track for success.
