As part of last year’s Dreamforce in San Francisco, Adam Farren, then serving as Head of Sales and Revenue Development at Huddler.com, spoke about building that organization’s direct sales organization. In a session featuring salesforce.com customers and their best practices for small-and-medium size businesses, Farren offered up the following takeaways.

Measure Your Outreach Efforts

Farren says he gets his salespeople and account executives focused on productive and measured their output, specifically their outreach to prospective clients, including all email activity as well as call activity. In discussing how they're to interact with their CRM system, he says “I have them BCC Salesforce in every email they send so that there’s a record on that account, and so that there’s an activity log that I can see. Then I have them call up their screen and put in call notes when they’re on the phone with the client, and then log that call.”

Tie Day-to-Day Activities to Compensation

Have one-on-one meetings with your team where you set these type of goals and, whenever possible, tie those goals to compensation. Farren’s team is given a bonus for hitting their activity goals on a weekly basis. “It’s not the only thing I pay them for. Obviously I pay them a commission on sales but this is an MBO, Management by Objective, that I layer in there and a tool like Salesforce enables me to measure that daily and enables them to see how they’re being measured as well. So I think it’s really powerful.”

Work on Prediction

Make sure that your salespeople understand how they'll be measurement and have those metrics approved by uppee management.  As it relates to the activity tracking noted above, make it clear that it’s not just measuring what they do with their time. It’s also about predicting and managing their business. So it’s not just a measuring tool, it’s also a prioritization tool. It’s how they manage not just their day, and their outreach, but their priorities as a salesperson so that there is alignment between management goals and personal goals. Everything is transparent so they see what and how they're measured and incentivized. If you can’t measure what you’re doing and predict your business as a salesperson, you’re not going to be that successful.

Make Sure Everyone Complies

Farren says salespeople are highly competitive and they want to see that their colleagues are using the same tools and same best practices. Avoid the situation of one salesperson, no matter their sales numbers, not using the same metrics and not being measured like their peers. That could only cause friction amongst your staff.

Farren says, “You want that culture within your organization of everybody holding each other accountable and management holding them accountable as well, and with transparency. So I really recommend you make sure absolutely everybody complies.”