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5 Sales Performance Management Software (In-Depth Comparison)

Mar 07th, 2022

A good sales performance management (SPM) software will (1) help you measure if training programs are helping reps sell in real-life and diagnose skill gaps, (2) give you the ability to create training content quickly and easily, (3) motivate reps to complete their training and, (4) provide coaching to verify if reps are ready to sell in the real-world.

There are many solutions available in the market and it can be difficult to differentiate between them to find the best fit for your needs. In this post, we’ll discuss how our solution, Brainshark — a Bigtincan company — differentiates from other tools. Then, we’ll also share four other sales performance management software for you to consider.

In this post:

Book a demo to discover how Brainshark can enhance your reps’ performance by diagnosing skills gaps, providing individualized training, and helping motivate reps with sales scorecards.

Brainshark

Brainshark

Differentiator #1: Use Readiness Scorecards to assign useful trainings and diagnose skill gaps before they impact performance 

Most SPM software can give you basic information about what training was completed and what score was received. Additionally, most sales performance management tools will only let you look at individual rep’s completion rates and scores or a team’s progress as a whole. This means you’ll have to switch back and forth between pages if you want to draw conclusions about:

  • Whether the rep is ready to sell.
  • What additional training they need before they’re ready to sell.
  • Whether the current training program is working or needs to be modified.

Brainshark, on the other hand, helps answer these complex questions with a built-in reporting dashboard we call “Readiness scorecards”.

Readiness scorecards let you pull data on trainings completed and scores for any combination of reps and display that information in easy-to-read reports. With these reports, you can compare reps who still need improvement to sales leaders so you can pinpoint differences in their training and scores. This gives you valuable insight into training gaps and what a rep needs to become successful.

Readiness scorecards.

In addition, Brainshark allows you to correlate training activities to sales KPIs (key performance indicators) via CRM and Salesforce integrations. This lets you pull sales performance metrics like opportunities created, total bookings, and deals closed and view those alongside training completion rates and scores — which gives you concrete visibility into the ROI of your training programs.

For example, Tom is creating fewer opportunities than other reps but has a higher closing rate and Suzie is creating the most opportunities out of anyone else on the team. Readiness scorecards could show you that Suzie took an additional training and scored 10% higher than Tom on all training for creating opportunities. Not only does this tell you what Tom needs in order to learn how to create more opportunities, it also shows that your training program actually helps reps with their performance.

KPI analytics.

Readiness scores can also be used to ensure reps are ready to sell before they go into the field.

For example, let’s say you want to know the baseline score a rep needs to achieve on a training regarding booking deals in order to be successful. With Brainshark, you can view a report that shows you a list of all reps who are hitting their goals for bookings and see what each of them scored on the specific training. The lowest score becomes your benchmark for all new employees.

View real time progress.

Differentiator #2: Let subject matter experts and leading reps create training content in under ten minutes to fill skill gaps 

Once you identify a skill gap, you’ll want to provide the necessary training as quickly as possible. Sometimes the training you need will already be ready and available, but sometimes you need to create additional training material.

Creating new training material is a time-consuming process for many companies. Many companies have a dedicated team for creating all training material because most content authoring tools require highly technical skills. So anytime you need a new training created, you would have to send in a request and wait until the design team has time to create the training.

While this process can work for training that doesn’t change very often (for example, first aid training), sales teams often need a much faster turn-around. The sooner a rep can take more training and improve their skills, the sooner they can apply those skills to make more sales.

Additionally, sales teams are often dealing with product information that is constantly changing. If reps can’t get training on a new product until days, weeks, or even months after the new product is released, they may have already missed opportunities to share that product with clients. Alternatively, the training could already be outdated because of a new change in the product — which ultimately affects your bottom line.

To solve this problem, Brainshark’s content authoring tool lets subject matter experts create dynamic, interactive trainings in under ten minutes — without having to learn how to use a new, complex software. 

Instead of waiting in long queues for new training material, you can capture the expertise of whoever has the most knowledge and the best track record on that specific topic.

They can leverage content they already have (e.g., PowerPoints, PDFs, etc.) by uploading it onto the Brainshark platform. They can also create new content from right within the content authoring tool. Then, the user-friendly interface makes it really easy to add voice-over narrations (or a video), embedded hyperlinks, attachments, or quizzes.

User-friendly UI for content authoring.

The types of interactive training your SMEs can make will help reps stay engaged and retain more information. The voice-over feature is especially helpful for many teams because you can easily direct the viewer’s attention toward important parts of the presentation or PDF which may otherwise be overlooked.

Additionally, reps are often more likely to volunteer to take additional training if it’s provided by a leading rep or peer they already know.

Finally, reps can access all training offline and on mobile devices.

Use Brainshark on any mobile device.

Differentiator #3: Motivate reps to complete more training and improve performance with badges and certifications

Part of sales performance management is helping reps reach their top performance so more sales are made and they experience increased job satisfaction. Adding an element of competition and validation (what’s often called gamification) into reps’ daily workflow is a great way to motivate reps to develop new skills and improve performance.

With Brainshark’s certification system, leaders can add an element of gamification by creating activities for individuals or teams to complete and offer rewards such as:

  • Badges of achievement: These can be displayed on reps’ personal profiles or made available for everyone to see.
  • Certificates of completion: Admins have the option to package several trainings together. If the rep completes all trainings, they will receive a certificate of completion.

All of this can be tracked privately on an individual or team basis, or you can utilize sales scorecards (which can also be used as leaderboards) to create a sense of friendly competition.

Leaderboards help reps understand where they stand in comparison to their peers. If they are lagging behind, they get motivated to perform better. If they hold one of the top positions, they’ll be motivated to keep up the good work.

One of our customers, Wrike, designed onboarding curriculums by sales role and used certifications as a way to ensure that new reps complete their onboarding training quickly. You can visit this page to read the detailed case study.

Differentiator #4: Easily verify reps are ready to sell with video coaching and AI-powered scoring

The last step in sales performance management is to verify reps are ready to apply their training in real-world scenarios.

Usually, managers verify this with mock sales calls or by ‘ride-alongs’ on real sales calls. In both cases, it can be difficult for managers to make the time to sit through the mock (or real) sales meeting and provide detailed, useful feedback for every rep. With ride-alongs, you’ll only be able to offer feedback on the rep’s performance after they have completed the call. This means reps end up practicing on customers rather than being prepared beforehand.

In contrast, Brainshark’s video coaching features allow for asynchronous training and for reps to be prepared before they sell to real clients.

Here is how it works:

Managers assign video tasks for reps to complete.

Next, reps can record their pitches directly on Brainshark’s video recorder. They can practice multiple times and submit the best recording. Before officially submitting the assignment, reps can ask for feedback from their peers and create a new recording that incorporates that feedback. This relieves some of the burden of one person being responsible for all training and promotes collaboration between team members.

Then, they officially submit their final recording.

Once the recording gets submitted, it will automatically go through Brainshark’s machine learning analysis for AI-powered scoring. Machine learning provides in-depth data on:

  • Emotion: This reports on what emotions were displayed during the recording based on an analysis of body language and tone of voice.
  • Personality: This report gives an object analysis based on vocabulary and sentence structure of whether the rep was friendly, dull, energetic, empathic, etc.
  • Topic coverage: This provides insight into whether or not certain topics or words were included or avoided during the recording.
  • Speaking rate: This tracks how slow or fast a rep was talking at any given time and on average over the course of the message.
  • Grade level: This helps you decide if the rep is oversimplifying or over complicating the message.
  • Filler words: This counts the number of filler words used and tracks which ones were used.

Machine analysis results.

Many video coaching tools only have set evaluation questions with slider functionalities (“strongly agree to strongly disagree”) to help managers evaluate reps. Without Brainshark’s machine learning, coaches would have to calculate insights manually (i.e. manually count filler words) or make their best guess which may be clouded by personal bias (e.g. “the rep seems confident, but usually they’re so timid that anything is an improvement”).

Brainshark’s video coaching and machine learning save coaches a lot of time on training and provides more concrete evidence as to whether or not the rep is ready to sell.

Learn more about how Brainshark can help your organization create, measure, and deliver better training programs and pricing details by booking a demo today.

4 other sales performance management solutions to consider

2. Varicent

Varicent

Varicent’s complete suite of SPM solutions enables leaders to:

  • Successfully plan territories and quotas.
  • Optimize revenue operations to capture missing possibilities in pipeline management.
  • Take advantage of the quickest and most flexible method of paying sellers on time.

Varicent has an augmented intelligence platform Symon.AI that offers predictive analytics on sales outcomes that allow you to make adjustments during the sales process to ensure that sales goals are accomplished. Reviews suggest that you will need a dedicated expert to operate even simple configurations on Varicent’s software.

3. Oracle

Oracle

The three key offerings of Oracle are:

  • Territory management that helps create territories based on product lines, geography, business units, and other factors. This segmentation helps ensure every territory is being covered.
  • Quota management, which helps in improving pipeline results by assigning reps an attainable quota while also covering business needs and planning quotas in response to market changes.
  • Incentive compensation management (ICM), which lets you handle large sales compensation plans, complete budget and compensation processes, and estimate total compensation payouts during the sales cycle.

While Oracle has many robust features, such as sales analytics, reviews suggest that Oracle is complicated to use and has a steep learning curve.

4. Xactly

Xactly

Xactly helps sales organizations:

  • Track quotas
  • Manage targets, payouts, and sales commissions with clarity
  • Track sales behaviors
  • Assign activities to meet sales goals
  • Manage sales territory planning

Users recommend Xactly for sales activities like fast payments, weekly sales incentive statements, and execution of complex calculations in creating reports.

Reviews suggest Xactly is best known for helping reps understand how their compensation plan, crediting, and budgeting works while giving them a forecast of their daily or weekly incentives.

5. Anaplan

Anaplan

Anaplan has three core components:

  • Plan: This component lets enterprises plan quotas, territories, and targets, so that team members are able to create more revenue and maximize their sales efforts.
  • Analyze: This component helps with the decision-making process by providing sales forecasts and real-time analytics on sales operations that drive revenue.
  • Act: In this component, individual sales reps are given incentives, such as additional compensation plans, as a driver for performance.

Anaplan also offers insights into market disruptions and how reps can evaluate their plans and sales strategies based on various scenarios.

Streamline sales performance management with Brainshark

Brainshark’s sales performance management tool can help you measure if training programs are helping salespeople sell in real life and diagnose skill gaps, and give you the ability to create the best training content to fill those skill gaps.

Finally, Brainshark helps you motivate reps to complete their training and verify that the training worked through video coaching and AI-powered scoring.

Ready to see how Brainshark can help you simplify sales performance managementBook a demo today.