Data-Driven Sales Leadership
Data-Driven Sales
Leadership Without The Iron Fist
The science behind sales will always have some fundamentals: Customer focus, optimism, activities, and tenacity. Most organizations tend to ignore the details in the data, only focusing on the bottom line. This can cause inaccurate forecasting, missed targets, and low morale.
Among some top companies however, there’s been more and more focus on data-driven sales leadership within the past few years. Data-driven leadership is what it sounds like – Using data to drive sales decisions. But it’s not enough for sales managers, CROs, and owners to simply look at their team’s revenue. The real power of sales data exists in learning what is driving the numbers and why.
While there is a lot of value in raw data, it can be tricky to introduce a brand-new strategy a sales team, one more focused a numbers or new metrics. The tips below are a great way to integrate data-driven sales without scaring employees.
What Numbers Should You Be Looking At?
Before introducing data-driven, spend some time analyzing the current numbers. What numbers are important to your organization – Call volume, length or sales cycle, closing ratio?
The numbers that you pick should be ones that are essential to your ROI and ones that you can measure. Choose just a few metrics to focus on first. The last thing you want to do is throw too many numbers at your team. It’s likely to overwhelm them.
The #1 Mistake to Avoid When Evaluating Metrics
While a new approach to sales can be thrilling, good sales leaders know they can’t exactly obsess about the metrics and still do a great job of developing their team into top-performers.
For CFO.com, Alexander Van Caeneghem and Jean-Marie Bequevort wrote about a software company Belgium. This firm found a strong correlation between the length of time their reps spent on the phone each day and revenue. This finding had management promoting higher call volumes among their sales team.
As time went on however, the business noticed the revenue growth had stalled despite their reps spending more time on the phone each day. What they learned was that to increase their call volume, team members had resorted to calling their family members, not prospects or customers.
Choosing the right metrics and properly defining them for your team is very important. The company that Van Caeneghem and Bequevort wrote about might have better luck if they measured their team’s call volume in terms of outbound dials made per day rather than time spent on the phone.
Of course, you might also consider having a different set of targets for different positions in your team. You may want to set a higher benchmark for outbound dials among your newer sales reps than your more seasoned team members.
Your veteran sales reps with more established clientele may need to spend more attention nurturing their existing relationships and growing account values, while a newer sales rep has yet to build up a clientele.
In the case of the newer team member, a higher number out outbound dials, making first contact, and weeding the suspects from the prospects may be what’s needed to establish a body of accounts worth nurturing.
How Can the Numbers Catapult Your Sales Team?
Once you’ve chosen you numbers to focus on, decide how these numbers can catapult your sales team into the universe of success.
Have you noticed a trend with the usage of marketing collateral and the number of new customers? If so, you’ll want your team to focus on using more marketing brochures and flyers at trade shows and on client visits.
Or maybe it’s a matter of which use-case narratives or discovery questions your sales reps are using. When you know which narratives or questions hit home with each of your buyer personas, your salespeople won’t have to guess or learn things the hard way.
Instead, leadership can prime even the least experienced rep going into a meeting, and dramatically increase their likelihood of success without having to be there to back them up.
How to Collect the Data
Your sales organization is only as good as the tools they use. A fresh selling strategy calls for fresh sales tools. Data-driven sales will fail if your team does not have the right tools to collect the data that matters.
It is very important to get your employees software that will track that data effectively and efficiently. Gone are the days of individual Excel spreadsheets and handwritten notes. Invest in a strong CRM that will accurately track the data.
Better yet is a CRM or bolt on tools that can capture data without your reps having to lift a finger.
Gong.io for example captures call recordings, transcribes them, calculates talk-time, and notes questions asked. Everything about the tool help sales leaders and their teams zero in on what is working, what’s killing sales momentum, how everyone involved can do their job better, and how the team can bring back more wins.
How to Synthesize and Use the Data
Once you’ve collected the data, what’s next?
The good news is that you can use the data in every aspect of your sales strategy from on-boarding new reps to increasing their sales productivity. Use the data in a win/loss analysis to understand why your products aren’t selling.
Examine the data to see where your sales team is spending most of their time. Are they doing too much data entry or spending too much time on emails?
The numbers will reveal things you may have not previously thought about. Once you have information on how your top salespeople have become your top salespeople, you can use that information to coach and train the rest of your team.
How to Foster a Love of Numbers Among Your Salespeople
Out of all the steps for a successful data-driven team, this is the most important. If your employees aren’t on-board with your data-driven approach to business, it is very likely to fail. To a sales representative, there’s nothing worse than following your boss’ orders, but not understanding why you are carrying out certain tasks.
Some employees may also feel micro-managed when you introduce them to their new role in collecting sales data. They may think leadership is trying to watch their every move. When leadership and sales teams are on the same page however, they become much better at closing deals.
Your team needs to be able to envision the big picture, and it is the responsibility of sales leadership to ensure that they can. Show them why you track the numbers you track, why those numbers are important, how they’ll affect their sales, and most importantly to them – how those numbers contribute to their compensation.
Establish Shared Team Goals
Introducing a new tactic can be scary – both for the management and the team. A team that is used to operating in traditional may be leery of operating with measurable activity and progress.
You’ll need to take the time to explain the importance of the goals set and how they translate to the health of your organization. The more quality information that you can share with your, the better they’ll understand how data can help them win more business and make more money.
Some sales reps will moan and groan. As sales professionals we know how much human beings love to adhere to the status quo, but sales leadership is responsible for coaching their talent to fight that natural compulsion in the same way our salespeople coach prospects to.
Once your reps understand why something like keeping their sales cycle length under a month is important, they will be much more willing to jump on-board with data-driven sales. So build your case and sell your sales team on data.
Offer Coaching & Training
A shocking 55% of businesses do not have a formal sales training process. Some sales representatives are thrown to wolves on the first day, but according to Accenture, studies show this is not an effective way of business. The teams that have ongoing training yield 50% better results than sales teams that do not.
Measure, Measure, Measure
Once your team is on-board and the tools are in place, measuring and synthesizing the data for insight should be a piece of cake, but it needs to be done on a regular interval. Your team can easily analyze new data as it comes in, and adjust their sales plans as needed.
Data-Driven Sales | The Takeaway
Despite sounding boring and tedious, data-driven sales should be the next step your sales team takes. It is a great way to streamline your current sales process and improve sales throughout your organization.
However, a new strategy is only as effective as the people who carry it out and the leadership that inspires them to do so. Make sure to keep your team well-informed throughout the process to ensure a success adoption of data-driven sales, and keep yourself from having to use metrics to police team members.
When your whole team is bought in to a data-driven approach, sales metrics become the catalyst for improvement, and that’s something to get excited about.
Author Biography: Taylor Tomita is a writer and coordinator for Analytics8. Analytics8 works with organizations to make data-driven decisions through transnational items such as data visualizations and data warehousing.
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