So, you’ve just stepped into a new sales leadership role - or you’re scaling your team to hit those ambitious revenue goals. Either way, there’s a lot riding on you. You’re staring down high revenue targets, working to build trust with your new direct reports (and the C-suite), and trying to hit the ground running.
You know your team has potential, but you’re not seeing it come to life in the numbers. You’ve got dashboards, activity feeds, leaderboards, and more tools than you know what to do with. Yet somehow, you’re still struggling to get the insight you need to drive real results.
Welcome to the world of modern sales leadership. The pressure is real. But the good news is that with the right lens, you can build momentum, confidence, and a team that delivers.
From my decades scaling teams and revenue, here’s how.
Start with clarity: Define what “good” looks like
Before you can measure sales performance, you have to know what you’re measuring against. That means going beyond quota and building a clear picture of what good looks like at every stage of the sales cycle.
Are your reps consistently booking qualified meetings? Are they running structured discovery calls? Are deals progressing at the right velocity? Performance is about more than just closed revenue, it’s about the behaviors that create it.
💡 Tip: Set clear expectations across leading and lagging indicators. Think: activity (calls, emails, demos), quality (deal qualification, next steps set), and outcomes (pipeline generated, deals won).
Don’t rely on gut feel: Use conversation and revenue intelligence to see what’s really happening
When you’re new to a team, it’s tempting to lean on anecdotal feedback or instinct. But you can’t coach what you can’t see, and vague impressions won’t help you scale.
That’s where intelligence tools come in. Rather than relying on rep-reported activity or surface-level CRM data, sales intelligence gives you a real-time, objective view of what’s actually happening on calls and in deals.
Tools like conversation intelligence help you:
• Understand how reps handle objections
• Spot missed opportunities in discovery
• Identify where deals are stalling
• Benchmark top-performer behavior
Quit tab-switching: Make your CRM your command center
Even with the best tools, sales leaders can end up playing whack-a-mole across platforms. One tab for your call recordings. Another for your pipeline management. Another for sales coaching notes. It’s exhausting. And inefficient.
That’s why it’s critical to bring your sales intelligence into the place you already live: the CRM.
It's why we built a native Jiminny HubSpot App and Salesforce App, pulling key insights from sales conversations right into the CRM. That means you can:
• See how calls are going without jumping to another tool
• Use AI to summarize key takeaways and objections
• Spot coaching opportunities at the deal, rep, or team level
With everything in one place, you spend less time hunting for insight and more time acting on it.
Prioritize quality over quantity in your early performance reviews
When you’re under pressure to prove yourself, it’s easy to default to traditional activity metrics: calls made, emails sent, meetings booked. These are helpful, but they only tell part of the story.
Early on, spend time evaluating quality signals:
• Are reps asking strong discovery questions?
• Do they establish clear next steps?
• Are they tailoring value to the customer’s needs?
• How are they handling pricing or competitor conversations?
This kind of qualitative assessment is where sales coaching becomes essential. By reviewing calls, shadowing deals, and giving targeted feedback, you create the conditions for long-term performance rather than short-term box-ticking.
Use AI to surface coaching opportunities at scale
Manual call reviews are powerful, but they’re also time-consuming. And when you’ve got a growing team, it’s impossible to listen to every call or be in every deal.
That’s where AI can supercharge your sales coaching.
Platforms like Jiminny use AI to highlight moments that matter: objections raised, pricing discussed, competitor mentions, and more. You can filter by topic, team, or deal stage, and get smart alerts when something needs your attention.
So rather than chasing issues after deals slip, you can proactively coach in the moments that matter most.
Tie activity and behavior to revenue outcomes
At the end of the day, sales performance has to ladder up to revenue. But it’s not just about whether deals are closing, it’s about understanding why.
By aligning your sales activities, behaviors, and outcomes, you build a clear line of sight from effort to impact. For example:
• Are reps with higher discovery scores closing more deals?
• Do certain call structures lead to faster deal cycles?
• Are top performers using different messaging or talk ratios?
With tools that combine sales intelligence and CRM data, you can correlate what’s happening in the field with what’s showing up in the forecast and coach accordingly.
Build a culture of feedback, not fear
Finally, remember this: performance improves when people feel safe to grow.
Whether your team is brand new or still forming, your job is to create a culture of learning and accountability. That means:
• Giving regular feedback (not just at QBRs)
• Encouraging self-review and peer coaching
• Sharing wins and learnings transparently
• Using insights as a tool for growth, not punishment
By making sales coaching a regular, supportive part of the culture, you unlock your team’s potential - not just for this quarter, but for the long haul.
The bottom line
Measuring sales performance in a new team isn’t easy, especially when you’re under pressure to prove yourself, hit targets, and figure out what’s working.
But with the right combination of clarity, coaching, and GTM intelligence, you can move from overwhelmed to in control. You’ll be able to see where the gaps are, coach your team with confidence, and build the kind of high-performing culture that consistently delivers.
And with tools like Jiminny bringing AI-powered sales intelligence into your CRM, you won’t just have data, you’ll have insight where it matters most. To see it in action, book a demo with our team today.
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