Today’s sales organizations are finding that data-driven methodologies are consistently trumping their “gut-feel” counterparts by increasingly large percentages in every KPI. The new competitive reality is such that companies that depend only on intuition and experience are not able to stay ahead of the curve when compared with those where they are using sales performance analytics in a holistic manner. Sales teams that are driven by data have 15-20% increase in revenue growth rates versus those who don’t have systems of underlying activity tracking and optimization. The capacity to aggregate, analyze, and respond to sales data has become a key differentiator between high-performing sales organizations and those just getting by in the new, highly competitive environment. When organizations adopt data-driven sales approaches, they unlock new insight into customer behavior, sales team performance data and market opportunity data that wouldn’t be possible with traditional sales techniques. Insight Selling allows companies to transform from reactive to proactive sales management – solving issues before they have an impact on the bottom-line, streamlining processes based on what has already been proven and making decisions based on solid information, not just gut feelings.

Old school sales methods that used to cut the mustard struggle in the modern marketplace when decision-makers are armed with tons of information and a wide range of suppliers at the click of a button. ‘Old-school’ demand gen is based on charismatic salespeople, generic pitch decks, one-size-fits-all messaging and neglects the new generation of personalized, data-informed expectations that modern prospects have during the buying journey. They also waste resources trying to sell to the wrong leads, miss opportunities because they don’t have a sales process in place for the times leads enter the pipeline on the same day or after they get the first touch, and have no organization when it comes to contrasting the performance of sales teams that do not operate on the same process, the same methodology and the same approach. Companies that continue to execute on sales and recruiting without clear data are all too often met with unpredictable revenue swings, inaccurate projections and difficulty identifying the specific activities that lead to closed deals as opposed to those that simply waste time or resources. Without a systematic way to gather and analyze data, sales leaders don’t have a clear picture of the why behind why some deals succeed and others don’t, robbing them of the ability to duplicate successful deals or prevent mistakes. What’s more, in the absence of data-led intelligence, sales teams struggle to become more flexible in their approach to a shifting landscape, changing customer demands and competitor dynamics, and unable to deliver an immediate response based on up-to-the-minute market information.

This complete book will show you how to use your sales data to make better decisions, promote the velocity at which deals are closed, and increase your win-rates and deal sizes, simply by applying data-driven methodologies to your sales process. We’re going to cover the KPIs every sales organization should be monitoring, the tools necessary to capture and structure this information, and the necessary analytical frameworks to make sense of it all. The objective is to give you a clear strategy to leverage raw sales data into tactical advantages that result in quantifiable impacts in team performance, customer acquisition costs and overall revenue expansion. With the tactics in this post, you’ll discover how to target the most profitable customer segments, optimize sales processes for maximum efficiency and develop data-fueled coaching programs that constantly raise the performance bar for both individuals and teams. We will also discuss how to set up a system to test and experiment in a scientific way so you can refine your sales process over time based on data and facts instead of gut feelings and 

Key Sales Metrics to Monitor

The heart of any good sales analytics program is the key performance metrics that provide the basic insights required to determine the health of sales and to point at areas that need immediate attention. Ratios between conversions during the stages of your sales funnel tell you where you lose most of your prospects and help you understand at what points you should concentrate your efforts to improve. Velocity measures provide insights to show you how fast deals move through the sales pipeline and help you identify choke points that hamper revenue and solutions to quickly advance deals. Win/loss drill-downs offer critical perspective on how well you’re competing and a roadmap that delineates what to emphasize that is working versus what to deemphasize that is not working when comparing successful to unsuccessful deal results. Average deal size metrics allow you to spot patterns in what your customers are spending, to assess how well your upselling and cross-selling efforts are working and to utilize this information to help you decide what investment you need to make in resources or territory plans. Cycle Length Data Here’s how knowing sales cycle lengths can help you set realistic expectations with prospects, allocate resources across various deal types more effectively, and find opportunities to tighten up your sales process so that you recognize revenue faster and keep your cash flow in check.

Activity & engagement reporting delivers deep visibility into the day to day activities and interactions that lead to successful sales, helping you discover the actions that matter most for driving revenue. Call and email volume data helps you find the exact right time to approach a prospect with your offer so that you are always aggressive without going over the top or desperation and never miss a follow-up to keep your solution in mind during the decision-making process. You can tell from response rates across your various communication platforms which outreach avenues are most effective with your target market, enabling you to focus your time and resources on what works the best. Meeting-to-Close Ratios – This metric will give you a deep understanding of your qualification process and help you understand if you are putting time into a prospect that is likely to purchase or if you are wasting resources on opportunities that have not been properly qualified. A scoring mechanism that takes into account your prospects’ interaction with your content, emails and sales materials — helps you decide what to prioritize and whom you should contact. These behavioral signals also allow you to create more accurate lead scoring models that allow your sales team to concentrate on prospects with the best buying signals and likeliness of converting.

Account and market intelligence offer the strategic circumstances that allow for more-informed decisions about target customer profiles, market positioning, and competitive strategies that lead to long-term success. ICP performance analysis shows you which account types have the highest lifetime value, the shortest sales cycles, and the highest retention rates so you can focus prospecting efforts on your most lucrative segments. Segmentation insights can identify perceptions on how and why customers buy and change that inform product development, pricing strategies and marketing positioning that is targeted to the appropriate audience segments. Regulation and label copy are scrutinized in detail to inform strategy and ensure that current and future products address the market overall. One example: customer satisfaction and retention by account type can tell you which types of accounts are most likely to grow their businesses with you, and which might need a different service level or offer to respond. Segment level market share breaks helps identify a competitor’s growth and how a specific vertically can be protected from these immanent loses.

Collecting and Structuring Sales Information

CRM software such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive remain the primary repository for most sales data, offering broad tracking of prospect interactions, deal advancement and revenue stats for your entire sales team. The YOUR CRM’s accumulate important touch points, communication history, and deal details that create the basis of any Sales analytics and strategic decisions are based. And technology vendors have introduced more sophisticated reporting and integration features in their CRM systems, providing the ability to pull in disparate data sources into cohesive dashboards and analytics views. Tools like Apollo, Outreach, and Salesloft give you granular engagement data so you can see how prospects react to various messaging, frequency, and content as they progress through the sales process. These tools measure email open rates, click-through rates, response rates, and booking rates, giving you an understanding of how your outreach strategies are working, allowing you to fine-tune your messaging for better performance. Marketing automation systems bring data to the table on how leads are behaving, engaging with content and managing digital touchpoints before prospects reach the sales pipeline, giving sales teams insight so they can customize their tactics to see their conversion rate go up.

Clean, consistent data To keep a clean approach to your data, you need to establish procedures for data hygiene, deduplication, and standardization so that your analytics can give us real answer rather than wrong answers. Routine data audit processes can help you easily spot incomplete records, outdated contact information, as well as duplicate entries which can throw a wrench into your analysis and cause you to make bad strategic decisions. By implementing clear guidelines for data entry and validation rules in your CRM, you are able to minimize inconsistencies in your data in terms of what gets put into the system, so that everyone on the team is using the same guidelines for entering customer information and deal specifics. A deduplication tool will help automatically identify and merge duplicate records, and a data enrichment service can help fill in missing information while keeping contact details up to date and accurate. Standardizing formats, such as phone numbers, addresses and company names, will make sure that your segmentation and analysis isn’t compromised by bad data entry. Consistent training on right data input practices ensures you sales team knows the value of good data and performs best practice o ensure your sales database stays clean over time.

Data visualization solutions such as Tableau, Looker, or even your CRM’s built‐in analytics capabilities do the heavy lifting of turning complex data sets into digestible charts, graphs, and dashboards so you can easily spot trends, patterns, and opportunities for improvement. With these capabilities, you can craft tailored views of your sales data on tile walls that maximize the metrics that matter most to certain roles, goals, and decision-makers in your organization. Interactive dashboards allow sales managers to dive deep into time frames, geographies, and customers to get insights on variances and to find areas that might need more focus or investment. Real-time reports provide your team an up-to-date account of what’s happening at any given point, allowing sales strategies and tactics to be adjusted rapidly based on the latest performance metrics. Automatic reporting tools provide frequent updates to decision-makers without any sort of manual labor, so everybody is in the know when it comes to KPIs and sales progress. Powerful visualization tools make it easy to spot correlations and patterns that can otherwise go unnoticed when using traditional spreadsheet formats, for deeper insights that lead to better strategic choices.

Data Analysis To Inform Strategy And Help Sucess

Mapping out blockages and points of disengagement for your sales pipeline means you need to systematically manage conversion rates in moving from one sales step to another, to determine where leads are most vulnerable to attrition. This is a good example of how finding small lifts in certain gap areas can have a big influence on overall sales performance and revenue generation. You can use heat mapping to see where prospects are spending the most time within your sales process and where they are most likely to fall out, giving insight into what stages need more focus, more resources, or more refining. It also allows you to see how different groups of prospects progress through your sales funnel over time, making it easier for you to predict future performance and identify seasonal or cyclical impacts on your conversion rates. T in the Box R3 allows you to look at what an appropriate amount of time to spend at each stage of your sales process is based, how long a deal should take to convert (and where’s it getting bogged down). Once you know these behaviors, you can make specific improvements that address the problems that prospects experience at various stages in their buying cycle, which will in turn increase conversion rates across the board and accelerate deals.

When you Segment high performing Accounts & Reps you get access to the attributes and behavior that are indiciative of top performance, so you can replicate top performing effort across any team. And detailed analysis of your best accounts will show patterns among companies of a certain size, in an industry, using certain technology, or with a certain organizational structure that will help you refine who your ideal customer is and whom you should be reaching out to. Analyzing the actions and processes of your top sales performers makes it possible for you to extract current best practices that can be standardized and transferred to your other team members through pinpointed training and coaching initiatives. Performance correlation analysis lets you know what activities and behaviors most reliably produce results, so you can point training and development toward the most impactful areas of performance team-wise. Compared to low performers, there are certain skills, processes or resources missing, which could be targeted for interventions and support programmes. This intelligence allows you to design better onboarding programs for new hires, program richer training for existing staff, and coach underperformers to pick up the best practices of your top performers.

Confidently predicting Requires building Predictive models from historical data patterns, current pipeline metrics and leading indicators (things we can measure that give an early signal of future sales performance). Advanced analytics capabilities allow you to have better, more accurate revenue forecasting which can be used for resource plans, goal setting and strategic decisions in your entire company. Trend analysis enables you to understand seasonal trends, market cycles, and other long term trends and their impact on your sales performance, so that you can adapt your strategies and expectations accordingly. Because machine learning algorithms can recognize these subtle patterns that a human analyst might not, they can give clues that make your forecasting models and predictions more accurate. Drawing up scenarios based on varying assumptions about market conditions, competitive pressures and internal factors means you are ready for any eventuality and can put contingency plans in place to remain a winner, whatever the conditions. Periodic model validation and your data-driven approach continually improve your forecasting and thereby your business planning forecast, the latter based on the performance of your previous forecasts, forming a virtuous learning cycle for your business prediction skills.

Converting Insights to Action

Optimizing your sales process for data-inspired refinements is the process of methodically pinpointing business process inefficiencies, bottlenecks and potential areas of optimization for targeted process improvements and strategic hacks. Data-driven process refinement helps you reduce sales cycle time by cutting out unneeded steps, raising the bar for qualification so you can target the better prospects, and simplifying communication processes that move deals through faster. When you A/B test prospecting qualification approaches, presentation delivery styles, and objection handling methods, you figure out which ones are most effective and teach them as standard operating procedures throughout your sales department. Comparing performance relative to industry baselines and prior historical performance, gives some sense of context into how effective process changes have been and it also ensures that improvements are actually leading somewhere, that they’re not just changing metrics, and remaining metrics are still bad or getting worse. Ongoing, real-time monitoring of KPIs following the application of process changes enable you to confirm the value of your optimization and identify any additional tweaks you might want to make (if any) to ensure your improvements are as impactful as possible. This method of process optimization in iterations ensure that your sales methodology is continiously able to improve over time based on empirical evidence rather than guesswork or old theories.

Data-driven sales rep training and coaching allows you to tailor development programs to each individual by addressing performance patterns, skill gaps, and areas for improvement that can be gleaned from in-depth performance analysis. Personal dashboards for performance take the guesswork out of what to coach—sales managers can see exactly what each team member is good at and where they’re struggling, allowing for focused coaching conversations on the most impactful areas of development. Performance Based Skill Gap Analysis ensures that your training programs are designed around the competencies that have the greatest impact on sales success so that development efforts are tied to driving measurable improvement in individual and team performance. Peer comparison and benchmarking allow reps to see how they stack up against team averages and top performers, serving as motivation and clear targets for performance improvement efforts. Frequent performance reviews backed by data make it possible to have objective, fact-based discussions on strengths, weaknesses and development priorities that enable more effective coaching. Promotion and competition based on KPIs can keep developers engaged while ensuring continuous improvement and healthy competition across the team to accelerate the performance of the whole team and keep the developers really enjoying their development process.

Using real performance data to refine and enhance your Ideal Customer Profile and targeting strategies means that your sales and marketing resources will concentrate on those prospects most likely to grow as profitable, loyal customers. By Wit Bandit Team Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) analysis allows you to determine the types of accounts that give you the most return on your sales and marketing investments, so that you prioritize your prospecting efforts accordingly. Conversion rate analysis by customer segment shows who is most likely to buy and who is a lot of work for too little payoff. Retention and expansion analysis Show you which customer attributes best drive longevity and growth potential, and use this to inform your qualification criteria and target account selection. Monitor where and how successful and territory and resource investments can be made most strategically by closely examining geographic and industry performance for the greatest opportunities and where to place territory assignments and resource investments. Frequent auditing and updating of your ICP based on current performance data ensures that your targeting is up-to-date and laser-focused to match market conditions, competitive trends, and customer preferences that are likely to shift and change.