Fundamentally, the activities involved in the sales cycle have not changed. What we do see today, though, is that the pace of the sales cycle has picked up. Technology has enabled today’s sales professionals to oversee more territories and accounts than in the past, and sales quotas do not diminish over time. And, of course, sales organizations continue to be made up of employees with a wide range of selling skills and experience.
Even though data relevant to the sales process typically is available to be collected, that doesn’t mean it always is collected, or once collected, that it is readily available and usable. This makes it challenging to use the right data to ascertain the path to optimal sales performance and to know how the organization’s performance compares to that of its peers.
Many organizations that do have access to appropriate sales data face challenges in their analysis tool set. It is not uncommon to have an array of applications, spreadsheets and dashboards that are used in a piecemeal way to attempt to understand the state of sales.
So although the potential may be there, many sales organizations have still not become functionally data driven. This reality is a key issue that hampers excellence in sales.
The first step is to take an honest look at the current sales data environment and assess what data is available and how it is being used. In other words, the first step is to identify the challenges that exist.
With a clear assessment of where things currently stand, it becomes possible to determine what opportunities exist to make improvements to sales effectiveness and efficiency using data. This is the stage at which to explore the feasibility of improvements already on the to-do list, and to determine what additional resources exist. It’s also the moment to examine the feasibility of applying current best practices.
In particular, I recommend a plan that moves toward becoming an organization that pursues data-driven insights in the decision-making processes within the sales organization.
Transitioning away from a data culture based on multiple heterogeneous manual data collection and analysis methods will be difficult. One of the biggest initial challenges will be helping the sales workforce understand the vision of a data-driven approach and the advantages this approach will bring to the organization.
Unifying and standardizing sales-related data to support consistent analytics and planning will be an important set of steps in your journey. It can be challenging to identify, normalize and integrate data to be able to generate metrics and then compare those metrics effectively, and even more so when you’re attempting to compare your performance with other organizations.
Having a consistent place to ascertain sales performance is a key first step. This means establishing a platform that enables the collection of the right data and supports detailed analysis, planning, and strategy refinement. Performing sales planning aimed at optimizing the use and hiring of resources will unlock value and improve the capacity of the organization to reach sales targets. And refining and optimizing the design of sales compensation will make it possible to use compensation more effectively to drive sales performance.
Making data-based decisions using sound analytic methods will reduce the risk of sales leadership making suboptimal decisions across a number of areas. This includes resource allocation, personnel assignments, compensation and incentive decisions and customer targeting.
Being data-driven and tied to a unified analytics and planning foundation will engender confidence in the organization’s sales performance. And increasing the performance of your sales processes will in turn help increase the tenure of your sales team members.
Sales is a 24x7 process in organizations, so don’t wait for the perfect time. Instead, the timing for pursuing this opportunity to improve should be based on how sales performance optimization is prioritized. Considering the various sales territories, compensation levels and human resources factors in the planning will provide scope to the initiative and help with deciding where to begin the improvement. But remember: The path of improvement is continuous and thus should not be considered a one-and-done type project.
Optimizing sales performance is for every organization that is looking to efficiently maximize the resources it uses. In particular, sales organizations that have dispersed geographic locations and more than one layer of organizational leadership can realize benefits from being more data driven. Note that this does not have to do with size, per se, but rather organizational structure. Every sales organization should be able to benchmark its sales compensation to specific, measurable performance metrics.
Today there are new methods for unifying data to feed analytics and planning that spreadsheets and BI dashboards were not able to provide. Embedded analytics and advanced analytic techniques using machine learning and AI can now be applied to sales data to unearth more valuable insights. And predictive models and forecasting analytics can now be used to create benchmarks that can guide decisions based on information from outside the organization.
The first and most important thing needed is the desire at leadership levels to optimize and manage sales performance to bring it up to best-in-class levels. Begin any initiative with confidence that a team effort will be possible across sales leadership and operations. Explore what is possible in sales analytics and planning. Look for practices that move the organization toward becoming data-driven in its sales planning processes.
I advise identifying two or three highly visible quick wins the organization can push toward. This could include a tools initiative that consolidates disparate data platforms within the organization or a refresh of compensation strategy that simultaneously improves transparency and morale for the sales team.