What is sales performance? And 5 ways to improve it

Talk to anyone in sales, and they’ll tell you the same thing: the goalpost is constantly moving. Quotas shift, targets creep up, and the playbook that worked last quarter now falls flat. Even when the team’s putting in the effort, results can be unpredictable and momentum hard to maintain.

That’s what makes sales performance so tricky. It’s not just about how many calls your reps make or how much revenue they bring in—it’s about whether your sales system is actually built to sustain success.

To get a clearer picture of why sales performance stalls (and how to fix it), I chatted with three sales experts who’ve helped underperforming teams turn things around. They shared what most companies overlook, how to spot the real issues, and what actually makes a difference.

Table of contents: 

What is sales performance?

Sales performance measures the overall success of your sales team. This includes hitting revenue targets, improving conversion rates, and building strong customer relationships. 

Sales performance isn’t just about making quota—it’s about how effectively your team moves prospects through the funnel, how well they use their time and resources, and how reliably they can deliver results quarter after quarter.

Sales performance vs. sales productivity vs. sales efficiency

To understand what drives strong sales performance, it’s helpful to distinguish it from two related—but different—concepts: sales productivity and sales efficiency. They’re often used interchangeably, but each one plays a unique role in your team’s success.

• Sales productivity refers to the volume of activity your reps are doing—for example, calls made, emails sent, and demos booked. 

• Sales efficiency is about how well your team turns effort into outcomes. For example, a rep who books five demos and closes four is more efficient than someone who books twenty and closes one.

• Sales performance is the big-picture result. It measures the quality and consistency of outcomes, like closed-won deals, customer retention, and long-term revenue growth.

Your sales team can be incredibly productive (making 80 calls a day) but inefficient (converting only 1% to meetings). Or be highly efficient (converting 50% of demos) but unproductive (one demo per week). In both cases, they’re underperforming. That’s why you need all three to build a top-performing sales team. 

Why does sales performance matter?

Here are a few key reasons why sales performance matters: 

• It fuels predictable revenue and sustainable growth. When your sales team consistently hits targets, you generate reliable cash flow that allows you to invest in product, talent, and long-term strategy. But when performance falters, growth stalls and budgets tighten.

• It enables accurate forecasting and confident planning. Strong sales performance provides the data and patterns needed to plan ahead and scale with clarity. Without it, forecasting becomes guesswork, and growth feels risky instead of repeatable.

• It boosts morale and helps you retain top talent. When sales teams qualify and close the right deals, post-sale teams can deliver on expectations, leading to happier customers and less churn. But rushed or misaligned deals create downstream headaches for everyone.

• It creates space for strategic thinking and innovation. A well-functioning sales system gives leaders room to analyze, adapt, and improve. If performance lags, the team gets stuck in reactive mode, focusing on short-term fixes instead of long-term growth.

4 ways to improve sales performance

When sales performance stalls, the instinct is often to generate more leads. But more leads won’t fix a broken system, especially if you don’t know where things are falling apart. Here are the five tried-and-true strategies sales experts recommend instead. 

1. Automate your sales workflows with AI orchestration

Most sales teams aren’t underperforming because they’re slacking—they’re drowning in tasks that don’t close deals. Automation helps shift the balance. “We use Zapier and other tools to generate 50 to 60 custom slide decks based on discovery call notes,” explains Flynn. “What used to take a full day to do now happens in minutes.” 

And it goes well beyond generating decks. By connecting Zapier with your sales tools, you can use AI to orchestrate sales workflows that dynamically adapt to real-time context. For example, you can automatically collect relevant company and contact details for upcoming sales calls, and then use AI to enrich the prospect, generate sales decks, and suggest talking points.

Or you can have AI automatically analyze sales calls after each call, generate call insights and feedback, and post them in Slack for reps to quickly review and act on. 

Learn more about how to automate your sales workflows, or get started with one of the pre-made templates above. 

2. Focus on qualified leads 

Even the best sales reps will struggle if they’re chasing the wrong prospects. Travis Simat, Enterprise BDR at Chainguard, puts it bluntly: “If you’re spending a lot of time on accounts that aren’t good fits, you’re going to burn out and miss your targets.” 

One way to help identify and prioritize qualified leads: Use a lead scoring system. It involves rating each prospect—often assigning a numeric value between 1 and 100—based on a combination of explicit and implicit data. The higher the value, the better a match they are to your ideal customer profile (ICP)—and the more likely they are to convert.

Zapier can streamline this process by automatically evaluating your lead data to generate lead scores, gathering research to help determine if they match your ICP, and sending that information to your CRM. Here’s a pre-made template to get you started. 

3. Use data to guide decisions 

Top-performing sales teams don’t rely on gut instinct—they use data to drive strategy. Flynn Zaiger, CEO of Online Optimism, shares the risk of skipping this step: “A lot of sales rely on personality and gut instinct. It’s like throwing darts at a dartboard in the dark, and there’s really not much you can do to improve it.” 

Here are a few sales metrics to focus on (for a deeper dive into each one, check out Zapier’s article on sales metrics examples): 

• Sales revenue (leads, actual, and forecasted)

• Customer churn rate 

• Revenue of new vs. existing customers

• Average order value 

• Customer satisfaction score 

• Customer lifetime value (CLV) 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) 

• Close rate

• Opportunity-to-win ratio 

4. Prioritize high-value deals 

Improving sales performance isn’t always about increasing volume. More often than not, it’s about focusing on the right opportunities. Larger, high-value deals typically require the same effort to close as smaller ones but have a significantly bigger impact. By shifting focus to these opportunities, your team can work more efficiently and drive more meaningful results.

That’s exactly what Brent Schepers, account executive at Willow, did to turn his team’s performance around. “We stopped chasing monthly MRR and focused on upfront yearly contracts. It stabilized our cash flow and gave the team a clearer target.”

Zapier can help you home in on those high-value deals. For example, you might orchestrate a sales workflow that uses AI to analyze your lead data against set criteria and then add leads to your CRM with the relevant tag.

5. Build a sales performance tech stack 

If your team is following the right leads and focusing on high-impact deals, your tools should be doing the same. A well-built sales tech stack gives you visibility into what’s working, takes the repetitive stuff off your plates, and keeps momentum going. Here are a few categories of sales performance tools worth adding to your stack—plus links to lists of app recommendations for each one:

• Customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM software acts as a central hub where you can track contacts, manage sales pipelines, automate communication, and improve customer service—it’s ideal for managing the entire customer lifecycle. But if you want a tool that’s focused on helping you track and optimize deals through the sales pipeline, you’re better off using pipeline management software. 

• Cold email software. Cold outreach is still one of the most direct ways to start a conversation with prospects, but it works only if it feels personal. These tools make it easy to craft, automate, and track personalized campaigns without sounding like a template. 

• Lead generation tools. Instead of spending hours combing LinkedIn or scraping outdated lists, lead gen platforms surface new, relevant contacts based on your ICP, buying signals, or tech stack. Some even integrate directly with your CRM to keep everything in sync.

• AI meeting assistants. These apps transcribe your meetings during sales calls, so you can focus on the call instead of scribbling down notes. Depending on the app, you can also get automatic summaries, key takeaways, and productivity analytics. 

• AI sales assistants. These tools act like an extra set of hands during the sales process—drafting follow-up emails, summarizing sales calls, and researching prospects. They’re especially helpful for keeping deals moving without requiring you to constantly context switch. 

• Generative AI tools. These tools help you create content that actually supports the sales process—think pitch decks, email templates, case studies, and one-pagers tailored to different buyer personas or objections. 

• Sales forecasting software. Reliable forecasts can make or break your revenue strategy. These tools analyze historical trends and real-time pipeline activity to give you a clearer view of what’s ahead, so you can course-correct early—not after the quarter’s over.

Try one new strategy this week

Sales performance issues rarely have a single cause—and they definitely don’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. But trying to fix everything at once? That’s a fast track to team burnout and a messier process than you started with.

A better approach is to step back and identify what’s not working—whether that’s poor lead quality, untargeted outreach, or disconnected workflows. Pick one area and apply one strategy to address it. Give it time, monitor the changes, and iterate from there.

Small, focused improvements compound fast. And that’s how you build a high-performing sales system that actually lasts.

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