Building a More Effective Sales Team Using Analytics

Your sales team is the backbone of your business. Today I’d like to talk about using analytics to build a more effective sales team. This is a big topic for many of our customers and I’ll give you some insight into how we’ve been helping customers to use analytics to make their sales teams go from good to great.

If you’re asking, why do I want to do this? Well, that’s an easy one. You need your sales team to be great and consistent and spending time on the right things. Good salespeople are the front line of your brand, they work hard, and they talk to a lot of people.

You want them informed and to know who the right people are to talk to and the right opportunities to chase. To make those kinds of decisions, they need the right data. When they have this information, sales volume and profits go up and your business will continue to grow. Here are 4 key steps to do this:

1. Collect the Right Data. Otherwise you can’t do anything with analytics. If you don’t know what the right data is, then try to collect as many generally available data points as you can (this is important for #2).

2. Measure Outcomes Not Activities. In that data you’re not looking for who’s doing the most of what kind of activity, you’re looking for what reps, teams and/or products or motions are creating the most outcomes for you as a business. Things like:

• Which things are driving the most profitable offerings?
• Which types of engagements are driving the best repeat sales?
• Which things are keeping customers retained longer?

Look at these outcomes and then you can back in to what are those activities. So, gathering the data that’s readily available on all the different activities will give you a lot of different data points to begin to analyze.

3. Find Patterns. Once you’ve collected all the data and you’ve focused on the outcomes you’re trying to create, you must find the patterns that create them. That’s where machine learning and leveraging advanced analytics come in – they help you find patterns and correlations that make sense.

This is where Pragmatic Works can come in and help you use different models to find these patterns. We can help set that up and get it going to show you what it can mean for your business.

4. Share This Insight. This is the most important thing. Share all this great insight with your sales team. Set it up so these models run in real time against your CRM and sales tracking and ERP systems. This way you can track and flag behavior, situations or those patterns as they’re developing instead of analyzing them after the fact.

When you understand the patterns that drive your sales team and help them to achieve goals, you can push that information about those patterns back to the team and you’ve got a data/analytic driven sales team. An analytic driven sales team will outperform your competitors every time.

If you’re interested in doing this with your team, Pragmatic Works can help you build those solutions and manage them for you. Click the link below or contact us to have a conversation about how a solution like this can help take your sales team from good to great and get your profits and sales volume numbers up or to learn more about our managed analytics platforms so we can take over the management and keep your teams integrated—and you can focus on growing your business.