As the year draws to a close, one of the many ducks you need to get in a row is your sales team’s performance review or appraisal. As a sales manager, you should have an accurate finger on the pulse of how each member of your sales team did this year. But before diving into writing performance reviews for each sales rep, consider trying something outside the box:

Getting your sales team to write their own performance reviews.

Of course, this shouldn’t absolve you of your appraisal responsibilities; after all, you are still their sales manager. However, what this does is offer a unique perspective – you can’t see everything going on at once – while challenging your reps to be self-critical and reflective. Additionally, setting this standard and responsibility early forces your sales team to:

• Be honest – Reps who sprout unwarranted happy ears with regards to their own annual performance should raise a red flag. The self-assessment will help create a culture of honesty.

• Take responsibility – If a sales rep had a bad year, they should be given the first opportunity to offer their mea culpa and get the first crack at diagnosing why this happened, and what they plan to do about it.

• Be diligent in logging sales data in your CRM – A transparent, data-driven culture, with strict standards on logging sales data in your Salesforce.com CRM, should be a given within your sales organization. If it is not, having your team write their own performance reviews at the end of the year should only increase the emphasis on data and sales analytics.

This last point is particularly important to note. Instead of offering subjective, intuition-based views of how they think they did, your sales reps should be able to dive right into the numbers and data and provide a succinct and accurate overview of their performance in 2013.

What sales performance metrics should reps appraise themselves on?

While the specifics of this will depend largely on the structure of your sales organization, there are a few key sales performance metrics that should be relatively uniform across all your reps:

1) Bookings

This should be the easiest sales performance metric for your reps to grade themselves on. How many bookings did they close this year? How many deals did they win, compared to the rest of their peers on the sales team? Did they meet their yearly quota? If not, how far off were they?

Their performance in this area should not be a surprise to them, you or anyone else on your team. If you have a sales leaderboard set up in your office, your entire sales team should always be aware of which reps are most effective at closing bookings. If you don’t, get your reps to dive into the data and create the appropriate reports.

2) Activities

Over the course of the year, a sales rep might get lost in how many calls they’ve made or how many emails they’ve sent. However, this can be avoided if the team has been diligent and accurate in its data entry. Activity goals are designed to be output-based, to the point where every rep should not have any excuse in not hitting their activity goals. Here’s where you want your reps to go above and beyond. If one rep has made 15% more calls than anybody else on his team, that should be noted in his self-assessment at the end of the year. This rep deserves recognition for, above all else, being a workhorse.

3) Activity efficiency

Making a ton of dials or sending heaps of emails is fantastic…but what if these calls and emails are being poorly executed, and ultimately don’t move the needle on the bottom line of your company? That’s where you want your reps to also track their own activity efficiency, i.e. how many of their calls end up connecting, how many of their connections result in meetings scheduled, and how many of their meetings scheduled become deals?

The key here is that you want your reps to be thinking critically about their own performances. That same rep from above who made substantially more calls might have a really low conversion rate across all his activities. Now, with a self-assessment, he will be forced to really dig deep and come up with answers for why this is, and what he plans to do to rectify it.

Your team might have a wealth of other sales performance metrics that you want your team to grade themselves against too. The important thing is that your reps know what metrics they are being measured against, how they performed this year against these metrics, and what their plan is for the upcoming year. Encourage this culture of self-assessment, honesty, transparency and critical thinking. Your individual reps – and your overall sales team – will be stronger for it.