It’s a tough time to sell. The sales performance gap weighs on sales leaders who are under pressure to deliver ever-increasing results while their teams remain the same size, while customers are increasingly hesitant to spend money. The combination of a more difficult landscape and constrained sales resources gives you two options. One: Work your existing teams harder, risking burnout and attrition among your sellers. Or two: Work smarter, not harder with the help of data analytics.
Most sales teams have at least some data working for them. But the analytics abilities available for sales today are much more powerful than what was available even a few years ago. It’s like having the power of Netflix’s recommendation engine—only applied to actions your sales team can take to approach their accounts. By gathering the information you already have and turning that information into repeatable tactics, data can be your differentiator.
Imagine a sales team that doesn’t have to rely on guesswork or intuition to plan their outreach strategies. A team that knows, before they start sending emails or making calls, what tactics will be the most likely to get a response from a customer. The best sales leaders are using data to do just this.
Sales productivity analytics allows sales leaders to analyze behavioral data for their sales and marketing teams. Using machine learning algorithms, companies can survey large numbers of individual deals and sales rep interactions, including emails, meetings, phone calls, and deal cycles, to find patterns in successful deals. As a result, they can identify which behaviors contribute to winning deals and boosting customer satisfaction scores. Sales leaders take those behaviors and coach both new and lower-performing team members to help them drive revenue.
Sales tactics are only one step in the sales process: Knowing what sales materials to field can also increase your win rate and deal velocity. Traditionally, creating and fielding sales materials has been more of an art than a science. But as with sales productivity analysis, many leading companies are now turning to data to help them improve and tailor their sales materials.
Data analytics can help companies identify specific materials and messages that are driving leads and wins—and which should be shelved. Good analysis can even show what types of materials reps should be using in specific phases of pursuits, allowing sales leaders to enhance sales cycles at every stage. With this data, sales teams can also identify what kinds of new materials they could use, submitting new requests from their marketing team and further strengthening their performance.
The sales performance gap is a challenge that all sales leaders face. However, by leveraging data analytics, companies and sales leaders can gain insight into the behaviors contributing to successful sales outcomes. Spaulding Ridge has helped companies in numerous industries put their data to work to create high-performing teams and drive both top and bottom-line growth.
To explore how data analytics can specifically help your revenue practice, contact us.
