Crush It With Attention

Don’t allow your future quota-crushers to languish in your CRM. Put in place activity timers that shine a light on any opportunity that passes one week in your sales pipeline with no activity. An effective practice is to create a chart pitting “Days at 10%” vs. “Days With No Activity”. Alert the team that opportunities lolling in the upper-right will be reallocated to other reps. Perhaps you can hand them to your fierce, hungry new reps who are slaving away in the sales prospecting mines.

Quality AND Quantity

A second check is to monitor each rep’s ability to convert 10% opportunities to a stage deeper in the sales pipeline. This metric helps separate inefficient prospectors from the pack, and chips away at reps who may be hiding behind a wall of fluffy pipeline building activity. Fortunately, it’s easier to course correct a rep who is a pumped, but inefficient, prospector. As we know, prospecting is a habit steeped in science, but closing deals is an art.

To combat orphaned 10% opportunities, focus on these 3 sales metrics:

1. Days Since Last Activity
2. # Days at 10%
3. % Conversion Rate of 10% Opportunities

Explore our suite of sales metrics in a live demo. Get Started.

The post 10% Is The Most Dangerous Stage in Your Sales Pipeline appeared first on GoodData.

Watch What I Do, Not What I Say

Begin by tracking their Activity Metric, that is, their cadence for fielding inbound leads, making outbound calls and sending prospecting emails.

• Inbound marketing leads: watch closely the Lead Response Time to see who is “on it” and who is letting valuable leads languish.
• Outbound calls and 1:1 emails: track the pace at which these are sent out. Make sure the pace is consistent without the peaks and valleys which may indicate a lack of focus and follow-up.

The Quality Side of the Equation

With lead pursuit and outbound prospecting on track, look to the quality of interactions to identify who needs help prospecting. To gauge this, track sales metrics like Contact Rate. That is, how many activities does it take to generate a single opportunity.

It’s helpful to provide new sales reps with activity quotas. This will help them track against a clear goal and alerts you when a new rep is going sideways. You can then step in to help them get more comfortable with the products they’re selling, fix whatever process issues may be holding them back, or otherwise address the issue.

In conclusion, keep these four sales metrics in mind as you embark on a more data-driven approach for evaluating your new sales reps:

1. Contacts Per Week (calls, emails, inbound leads)
2. Lead Response time (for marketing leads)
3. Contact Rate (# calls to generate an opportunity)
4. Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion % (for marketing leads)

To see some interesting sales metrics in action, take a moment to review this interactive sales dashboard.

The post Sales Metrics That Forecast New Rep Performance appeared first on GoodData.

To eliminate end-of-the-quarter surprises, here are 3 key sales analytics tips to help you deliver “intelligence” across your sales organization.

 Create a visual that allows you to see change  & progress for each stage in the pipeline.
To make an accurate prediction of how the quarter will end, you need to be able to see pipeline movement at a glance. All pipeline opportunities should be thoroughly analyzed to determine actions that may be required. Start by tracking changes in the pipeline over the period – this will show you where your dollars are going and what business was lost, won, reforecast or moved out to another quarter.

A good view into the current position highlights risks in your pipeline in time for you to course correct.

 Identify “Stuck” Deals.
Every organization has an ideal sales pace and velocity. Deals that follow this progression are more likely to close than deals that lose momentum or get stuck in stage. Where is there progress? How are “actuals” trending towards goals? What is the path to reaching goals? By looking closely at actual performance versus the goals, the sales organization thoroughly understands the scope of work that still needs to be completed.

Understanding the ideal velocity for a winning deal can help the sales organization identify which deals are off pace or which deals got off to a good start but got stuck in stage. Focus your efforts on these deals, as they are the ones that can save your quarter.

 Always know your current position.
You can’t manage what you can’t see, and access to the right information at the right time helps you make correct decisions. These decisions are crucial in determining priorities, optimizing sales leads and giving you insight into every sales opportunity. Use your comprehensive sales data to visually show how much business has closed, what deals are expected to close, what deals are at risk and if anything significant happened to effect the quarter. This means showing progress towards quarterly goals across all regions and products, and estimating where the quarter is going to finish.

In other words, what is the overall outlook for the quarter?

Ready to turn your opportunities into wins? Take a look at more “intelligent” sales analytics.

The post 3 Tips to Improve Sales Pipeline Performance appeared first on GoodData.

On the other hand, you might get lucky and make your numbers on two major deals. But that approach doesn’t scale. The next quarter, you might be back in the trenches with no real results. Meanwhile, you wouldn’t really know what your team did right or wrong from one quarter to the next.

The problem with that old-world sales approach is that the data was buried. You had to substitute guesswork for measurement, tearing your hair out in the process.

Time to Forget About the Past

Thanks to data measurement solutions like GoodSales, you can open the door to the new world of sales. In this more user-friendly environment, it’s not all about making numbers anymore. It’s about reading and adjusting.

GoodSales enables you to get a snapshot of your entire sales organization to tweak your strategy and bring on success. You can track performance at a granular level, measuring everything from automated email campaigns to closings. Because you can view the individual activities of each of your reps, you can drill down which activities tend to close deals, and when.

That helps you know what to concentrate on during certain days in the sales cycle. For example, you might find out that your healthy sales cycle tends to have 35 meetings per rep during Phase 1, 55 during Phase 2 and then four closings during Phase 3.

Adjusting in Real Time

If you’re not closing sales as expected, you can compare your team’s current data to that healthy sales cycle, viewing which of your team members are on pace and who’s off. It’s all about using the granularity of your data to compare your current scenario to the ideal scenario.

If someone isn’t making their numbers, you can adjust their behavior. Say a successful rep tends to have 20 meetings by the third week of the quarter, and your slow rep only has five. You know where the deficit is, so you can fix the problem.

That’s an approach that will scale.

Fixing the Big Picture

The same concept works for your overall pipeline. Even if you’re not where you want to be as a team, you can take advantage of data to fix the issue.

GoodSales allows you to see which deals are at which stage in the sales cycle. You can get an idea of which deals are slated to close outside of the quarter. If you’re at the end of the quarter, you can choose to close some deals faster and move others out of the quarter entirely.

The old world of sales didn’t have that kind of visibility. You couldn’t take the kind of productive action you can take today. The end result is that you iterate your team over time and enjoy greater success in the long run. Welcome to the new world of sales.

The post How to Measure Your Way to Sales Success appeared first on GoodData.

How To Avoid Being Tone Deaf To Customers

Let’s say that you exceeded your sales quota last quarter. You’re rewarded with the company car. That car happens to be a Ferrari 458 Spider.

Chances are, you’d want to take your new Ferrari out for a spin to see what it can do. You probably wouldn’t leave it sitting in the garage and ignore it. But that’s exactly what many B2B salespeople do with the technology they’re given.

Wasting Time on Tone-Deaf Tools

Social media, email campaign and marketing automation tools, to name a few, can give salespeople incredible horsepower in terms of building a quality sales funnel. Yet many companies choose to ignore the potential of their tools. Instead, they stick with tone-deaf techniques like cold calls, or one-way, impersonal email and social conversations — in other words, shooting in the dark for leads.

Email marketing and social tools are also meaningless if they don’t bring intelligence to the conversation between the sales force and leads. What good is blasting out content if your leads still don’t know who you are?

Intelligent Information Generates Better Leads

The key is to bring intelligence to the conversation by configuring each of your messages in a way that’s attractive and relevant to your individual prospects. Here are three ways to use information intelligently — and avoid being tone deaf:

1)   Have the right tools to listen.

Listening involves much more than seeing who opened an email you sent. You want to monitor how people are both finding and engaging with your website.

Which SEO and SEM techniques are working, and in which search engines? What are the main ways that people are finding your products or services? What are people saying about your brand and competitors? How are they finding you in the social sphere? Know the details of how people operate in your company’s online channels, so that you can take intelligent action on the information that you uncover.

2)   Take action on the information you find.

It’s one thing to know that someone is interested in your product. Taking action on that interest is another issue entirely.

One of the most positive things you can do is to send out your product information in a personalized way, then score each lead on their interest and responses. If a lead’s activity is compelling enough, for example they visit your service’s pricing page, forward their information to a salesperson.

Genius automates such personalized communications and the scoring of leads. When I first learned about Genius, I thought to myself “I wish I’d known about this years ago! I would have been rich.”

Coming from a traditional sales background, I’m no stranger to the pain of cold calling. Genius supplants that pain by automating personalized responses and follow-ups, so that leads are engaged on a human level. When you attach Genius to your sales database, you can send personalized messages to each lead ensuring an impactful, engaging and automated qualifying conversation.

The automated version of the salesperson will intelligently engage and respond with a lead for months, keeping them warm until they’re ready to buy, at which point the salesperson would take over communications. In other words, when the sales team does get engaged, there’s already a relationship in place, but no blood and tears have been lost in the process.

3)   Understand trends at the aggregate level, so that you can optimize the first two processes.

The more you understand the channels feeding your pipeline, the better you’ll be able to communicate with your leads. GoodData is very helpful for Genius customers in this step. GoodData can tell you any number of things, including which pieces of content people find most attractive on your website, which channels drive the highest number of clicks, longest visits to your website, and revenue contribution. You can find out what you’re doing well and where you’re lacking, and optimize the weak spots to drive greater traffic,visibility to your brand, pipeline and revenue.

Now Go Out and Drive That Ferrari

At the end of the day, people do business with people. It’s time to use the technology at your disposal to bring the human touch back into your sales funnel. With social media and marketing automation, and tools like Genius and GoodData, you have a Ferrari sitting in your sales garage. It is time to start it up and drive revenue.

Even serves as the Vice President of Revenue and Business Development for Genius.com, prior to which he served as Director of Corporate Sales. During his tenure as Vice President, the Company has grown ASP, reduced churn while expanding Genius’ footprint into five international markets.

Prior to joining Genius, Even was Vice President of Sales at Practice Fusion, Inc. Prior to Practice Fusion, he was with an Associate Managing Director with Oppenheimer & Co., where he managed over $325MM in corporate investments. Even graduated with a Bachelors in Economics from San Francisco State University, and is trained in financial, econometric and BI statistical data analysis.

The post How To Avoid Being Tone Deaf To Customers appeared first on GoodData.

Know thy audience. For the first time in history, thanks to Big Data, sales reps can access petabytes of aggregated information to paint a cohesive picture of their prospects before even contacting them. We can understand a prospect’s marketplace, their industry, customer base, competition and even individual decision makers within their organization. If you take advantage of this information and really do your homework, you can be a lot more targeted in your sales approach, winning more sales as a result. GoodData’s Bashes provide all the insights you need in an intuitive interface.

Always be on the front of your seat. The most efficient and successful reps I’ve seen are mercenaries. They’re accountable, curious, hungry, passionate, always looking for the next opportunity, and are willing to run through water or fire to get there. They use all facts and figures available at their fingertips, from their own connections to analytics to digital body language in order to get in front of a prospect.

Make it personal. If your prospect is only willing to give you five minutes on the phone ask them one simple question: “What are you personally measured on?” This will gain their immediate attention, as it turns the discussion from an average business conversation to a personal one.  Measurement is about success and implicitly, job security. At that point, you’ll intimately understand what your prospect’s challenges are — and now you can reverse-engineer your meeting based on that simple question.

It’s all about them. Once you’ve used all available tools to get in front of a prospect, now it’s time to research that individual. Know their preferences, where they’ve given presentations, and what they’ve written. During the meeting, share with them what you learned and how much you liked their presentation and/or written content.  When they feel recognized and acknowledged, they’ll give you credibility and their attention. Your goal at this point is to match (or create) a mental map of the perfect solution for them. This is relevant so that when they look at a spreadsheet of all of your competitors, they’re rationalizing the ‘how’ you do it and the ‘what’ you do (feature, functionality) from what their subconscious tells them they need. This is what I call ‘the sales Jedi mind trick’.

Teach your prospect. During your meeting, earn your right to sell by teaching your prospect something they didn’t already know. For example, when selling GoodData, our sales force first demonstrates how people in their exact role use our solutions to report, analyze and measure their business data. It shows our prospects a new way to think about their business that maybe they didn’t think of before. It also gives you credibility, as it shows them you are qualified to help. We then ask them about their own roles and demonstrate real-life scenarios of how GoodData would be used in their business. As a result, the prospect has the ability to see themselves sitting in their own, customized GoodData cockpit. Once your prospect can visualize themselves using your product and understand what it can do for them, they will rationalize how to cover costs, installation and all the other logistics that might otherwise have been objections.

Of course, the key to all this is having a product that is naturally well designed and easy to understand. At GoodData, we like to say that our product rationalizes itself. Once prospects see how intuitive our Bashes and BizData Monetization platform are, they can easily see how GoodData could benefit them personally and professionally.

The post Don’t Boil the Ocean: 5 Tips for Being an Effective Sales Rep appeared first on GoodData.

1. #1 What’s Your Plan
2. #2 Who’s Leading the Charge
3. #3 The More Things Change
4. #4 Your Current Position is a Work in Progress

#5 Latest Generation in Business Intelligence is GoodBusiness

It seems like everything is big these days. Big cars, big stores, big food packages, big sports stadiums, big buildings, big businesses, even big people. This bigness everywhere generates more bigness, and in business the bigness evolves into Big Data, datasets so large and complex that they are difficult to work with using standard database-management tools.

A new generation of Business Intelligence (BI) is needed to work with Big Data. BI that provides real-time and relevant insight into markets, customers, employees, competitors, products, financials and brands. If you’re thinking this BI encompasses everything and everyone in your company, you are absolutely correct. This is what I call GoodBusiness, a way of running a company that focuses every single employee on the same critical goal—hitting your sales target.

It’s a powerful and effective way to do business, providing tremendous value and benefits to companies large and small. GoodBusiness provides solutions that meet specific business situations by connecting data with people and processes.

Analyze a large sales force, with a global view into their pipeline, and then increase their sales and revenue.

Examine a customer support organization, looking at support ticket volumes, resolution times and individual support agent performance, and then optimize efficiencies and effectiveness to increase revenue for premium services.

If you’re a radio station or Internet streaming service, use GoodBusiness to analyze customer listening patterns and understand the demographics of customers for different songs and artists. Then sell targeted advertising space.

You’ll get answers fast to all your critically important business questions. You will rapidly extract business value out of your data. Everything will be driven by the business for the business. It’s the ultimate in business best practices, and will absolutely ensure ongoing business success.

All the topics I’ve talked about in this post—having a plan, effectiveness, tracking changes, your current position, business intelligence—fit into an overall winning strategy for your company. But most important of all is doing these things based on real-time data and current information.

This detailed real-time information gives you a complete and accurate picture of your current sales situation. This information must be continually adapted to immediate needs in order to minimize pipeline risk, highlight changes in opportunities and enable a laser-like focus on high-value activities.

Is your company business intelligent?

The post Kick Your Sales Into Gear: 5 Foolproof Steps [ #5 Latest Generation in Business Intelligence] appeared first on GoodData.

1. #1 What’s Your Plan
2. #2 Who’s Leading the Charge
3. #3 The More Things Change

#4 Your Current Position is a Work in Progress

Which is why you always need to keep the Big Picture in clear view. You can’t manage what you can’t see. Getting the right information at the right time eliminates blind spots and gives you what’s needed to make the correct decisions. Determine your priorities. Optimize your sales leads. Get insight into every sales opportunity. You need this data to close more business and increase sales revenue.

The Big Picture of your current position includes the progress you’ve made toward quarterly goals across all regions and products. Where is the quarter going to finish? Use comprehensive sales data to visually show how much business has closed, what deals are expected to close, what deals are at risk and if anything significant happened to effect the quarter.

Simply stated: What is the overall outlook for the quarter?

By looking closely at actual performance versus the goals, your sales reps thoroughly understand the scope of work that still needs to be completed. Where is there progress? How are “actuals” trending towards goals? What is the path to reaching goals? Is your organization on track?

Real-time data-handling techniques will give you answers to these questions. Use the data to position your sales organization to meet its quarterly goals.

Make sure you scrutinize everything at the “current point” in the quarter. Things such as the planning of territories and quotas, the management of forecasts and sales representatives and the final review of what was attained.

Don’t wait for the future to come to you. Predict it. Address your key challenges. Deliver “intelligence” across your organization. Eliminate end-of-quarter surprises.

What is your current position?

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1. #1 What’s Your Plan
2. #2 Who’s Leading the Charge

#3 The More Things Change

I’m fairly confident you’ve all heard the saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Well, yes and no. When it comes to politics and elected officials, I’d say absolutely “yes.” But in sales, the answer is a definite “no,” simply because the more things change, the more they change. As a sales manager, you better stay on top of those changes. This isn’t just another election, this is make it or break it time for your company.

How much business have you won? How much progress are you making toward your organization’s sales goal? Better compare where you are now against historical estimates. You don’t want to fall behind. How have things changed in the last 24 hours? Check on your actual numbers to understand what deals are changing and why.

Many other questions should be asked as well. How fast is my business creating and closing opportunities? What regions and what reps are creating the most sales opportunities? It’s essential that you monitor wins as you progress through the quarter. Try to stay above quota.

The sales pipeline is extremely important when attempting to make an accurate prediction of how the quarter will end. How large is the pipeline in comparison to your quota? Try to carry four or five times the best case pipeline. Understand how the pipeline changes over time. Changes in the pipeline over the period will show you where your dollars are going and what business was lost, won, reforecast or moved out to another quarter.

Monitor events that are effective, and examine them closely. The biggest movers are opportunities with the largest absolute change in sales stage. The biggest “shakers” are the opportunities with the largest absolute change in value. Look at the win/loss highlights of the current period. Are the most lucrative deals still open? How much of the pipeline do they represent?

You should sound the “uh-oh” alarm if the expected and won estimate is not above the quota. Monitor your estimate and current status in the same chart. By looking closely at actual performance versus goals, you’ll thoroughly understand the scope of work that needs to be done.

As your sales organization becomes more complex with multiple product lines and business units, it’s important to see pipeline information for all your teams. Look at progress towards quarterly goals across all regions and products, and estimate where the quarter is going to finish. Use comprehensive sales data to visually show how much business has closed, what deals are expected to close, what deals are at risk and if anything significant happened to effect the quarter.

Do a great job, and you might get nominated for a higher position.

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1. What’s Your Plan

#2 Who’s Leading the Charge

Not General Custer we hope. What we really mean is which sales reps are winning the most deals, and who is carrying the largest “best case” pipeline? What actions are those sales reps taking that are winning deals? If you want to run the most effective sales organization possible, you need to know these things. Along with thoroughly understanding the top opportunities, top products and top regions.

Your sales pros need to win, and not just win once. They need to win at every stage of the potential customer’s buying process, and earn their business on the right terms and in the right timeframe. That’s sales force effectiveness, a very useful metric to measure success.

Improving sales effectiveness means understanding what’s working and not working. It also means continuous improvement of the knowledge, messages and strategies that your sales reps apply to sales opportunities. As a manager, you can make changes to improve future sales after analyzing sales reps’ performance.

A big part of that analysis is asking “What activities are driving sales, and are those activities “high value?” Compare the average number of activities associated with opportunities. Compare those activities to opportunities that were won during the quarter. Focus on sales reps with high-value activities, and assess the impact of those activities on closing deals.

Whew, this is getting a little heavy. Activities, high value, assess, compare. Let’s simplify it a little. You must identify the sales reps who make activities pay off. What are they doing that other reps aren’t doing? Are they using specific activities for certian opportunities? Which reps are super-active, setting a furious pace of winning deals?

You also need to accept the fact that maybe effectiveness is not rep-specific. It could simply be trending- you know, the trend is your friend, until it’s not. Maybe it’s a specific day of the week where activities have a magical effect on potential customers. That’s why you see spikes of activities on those days.

Another critical factor to success is the average pace and duration of won deals. Which deals are off pace and getting “stuck.” Examine closely the various stages of sales. Usually, sales movement is broken up into five or six stages. How long is it taking a deal to reach a stage? Any opportunities that are more than 50 percent off pace should be called out and looked into quickly.

What are the stage durations for winning opportunities? How long does a winning deal spend in a specific stage? Opportunities in a stage more than 50 percent of the winning duration should be called out and investigated.

“Effectiveness” is certainly an over-used word, and I wish we could pull up a synonym finder and replace it with something a little more tangible. You know, a word we could really wrap our arms around. But this is the sales business, and effectiveness means increasing revenues, upping win rates, making forecasts more accurate and improving the talent of our sales team. Certainly nothing to sniff at. Not if you want your company in the winner’s circle.

How ’bout it?  What is “effective” for your sales organization?

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