If you’re even a casual fan of the major American sports, you’ve noticed some significant changes this past decade: defenders positioning themselves in entirely new places on the baseball diamond, basketball players avoiding mid-range shots like the plague, and once-prized football positions seeing a steep downgrade in value.
Whether these sports have become better or worse because of these changes is debatable. What’s clear is the primary driver behind every single one of them: data.
As a result, everyone — from owners to general managers to coaches to players — has needed to measure performance differently or risk becoming the Washington Generals of their league.
Like every other sector, sales has seen its share of analytics-fueled evolution. Consequently, if you’re a sales or sales operations leader responsible for translating technological advances into competitive advantages, you may be wondering: Are we managing our resources based on “Moneyball” stats or bygone yardsticks like batting average and RBI?
New-Age Approaches to Improving Performance through Sales Data
If your sales team is like most, you’ve been amassing more and more data. You’re also having more conversations about how to put this data to use for the sake of hiring your next superstar, retaining your latest sale long-term, and anything in between. This intensified focus on data is validated by the fact that nearly half of all sales leaders who invested in sales analytics reported their ROI was significantly higher than expected.
In the interest of changing the game to your advantage, here are three new-age ways you can use data to improve performance.
Make Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) Calculation a Reality
Hardly a new data point, CLTV makes this list because, for many companies, having this information was once idealistic: What if we actually knew that?
And now it’s an oh-so-close reality: Why don’t we know that yet? We have the data. We know how to calculate CLTV.
With a firm grasp on CLTV, much of the guesswork that goes with routine decision-making vanishes:
- Should we keep spending this much on that ABM campaign?
- Should we dedicate the lion’s share of our time to these types of customers or those ones?
- Should we concede to this customer’s demand?
For so many questions, CLTV provides a crystal-clear answer. What remains unclear is which metric is best for quantifying the money saved from no longer needing to deliberate and second-guess everything to death.
Compare and Contrast Closed/Won Deals vs. Closed/Lost Deals
When we win sales, it’s common to pop the cork, bang the gong – whatever your team does to declare victory – and move on to the next deal. When we lose, we might perform a retrospective for bigger deals. But for the most part, many trust the salesperson to select the single biggest reason for failure from a dropdown.
Later, when the closed/lost report comes out, we as sales teams try to determine what to make of the array of reasons we failed. Realistically though, how much can we expect to improve by looking at something similar to the following month after month?
- No decision – 47%
- Timing wasn’t right – 28%
- Price was too high – 15%
- Went with a competitor – 9%
- Other – 6%
A better approach is to perform a more granular analysis of both your closed/won and closed/lost opportunities. And to be sure you’re getting an apples-to-apples comparison with clear takeaways, it’s important to ask the same questions of both your victories and defeats. Here are a few questions and factors you might consider:
- Which of the following is true about the account? This should almost read as a checklist of your various customer profiles and will vary depending upon your company and the nature of your business. Checkbox examples might include business type, company size, geo, first-time buyer, already has a solution, etc.
- Lead source?
- Days in pipeline by stage. Ideally your CRM can automate this.
- Content consumed? This entails a checklist of your most commonly used sales and marketing content.
- Internal partners included. This could include the number of people involved, the actual people involved, or both.
- External partners included. This could help you understand which consultants and value-added resellers (VARs) are most effective.
- Number of LinkedIn connections between company and account.
- Primary contact method (could be a dropdown with options like email, LinkedIn InMail or LinkedIn Messaging).
- Sales process steps completed. Include both mandatory and optional steps in your sales methodology to compare outcomes
Again, some of these will make more sense for your company than others, but whatever data points help you discern between failure and success are fair game. There are certainly more parameters you could add, or you could pare it down quite a bit and still greatly enhance your current level of insight.
Hopefully reading the above list gets your wheels turning. Executed successfully, this practice provides a line of sight into which aspects of your sales process should be emphasized and replicated, and which ones need to be avoided or rethought.
Go Beyond Closed/Won Opportunities to Replicate Even More Ideal Outcomes
Clearly one of the biggest advantages of the previous suggestion is fostering a better understanding as to which parts of your sales process show the strongest correlations with success. But why stop there?
What if you were to map those same data points above to your ideal, ideal customer? By that I mean those who serve as references, provide testimonials, advocate for your company on social media, or continually refer business your way.
If you’re already comparing and contrasting closed/won and closed/lost opportunities, you’re already most of the way there. Simply continue to track deals down the road similar to how you’d keep tracking to calculate CLTV, and make sure your CRM gives you the option to flag your referrers, advocates, etc. for easier analysis.
Now granted, some of these ideal, ideal customers won’t call your attention to any sort of repeatable pattern. But just like how sports teams gain a major edge by using historical data to reconstruct wins and player acquisition successes, you too can find those little advantages that are sure to improve your launch angle.
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Topics: Sales management
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