Contemporary sales environments explicitly instruct sales teams to progress based on analyses of available data to win or retain customers. The winning smile and the elevator pitch alone aren’t enough to ensure sales success any more; sales teams need data.
You’ll save your team members time and energy by tailoring the call list according to a set strategic criteria, so your sales agents won’t have to vet anything but the most relevant leads and prospects.
Analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
You must only set KPIs that align with your goals. If you want to change a process, you must track a leading indicator. If you want to describe something that has already happened, you must track a lagging indicator. In short, there are leading and lagging KPIs available to measure future performance and past events. Select those KPIs that will best measure your performance targets, and assign someone who’ll be responsible for tracking each KPI’s outcome and charting its progress. Someone who’s able to read data correctly; someone who is able to place things into a perspective for others; someone who’s more minded – not least because he or she wishes to keep earning a living – to report a success rather than a failure so that he or she can continue improving it. Make sure that it’s presented in charts and dashboards that are easier for people – managers especially – to acclimate to and to use to take action. Ensure that your KPIs are flexible enough to evolve along with changes in the nature of your business.
Identify Key Success Factors
As sales known to the world, data analysis keeps getting more important for developing efficient sales strategies. Thanks to contemporary sales metrics and trends analysis, based on appropriate tools, sales management could identify the gaps of both overall performance and leading sales success factors. Identification of these factors can contribute considerably to refining your sales strategy in ways that both increase revenues and help you focus on the activities that have been shown most effective, dramatically improving the impact for your efforts and reducing the cost of operations. Targeted prospecting can help to reduce your operating costs, too, by helping a business to avoid the expenditure on vague marketing campaigns and develop a laser-focused sales strategy. Don’t be fooled into thinking that unless you have the ‘right’ type of data or unless that data has been used before, that you can’t use it to build and iterate on your sales strategy. Winning organisations make data hygiene a top priority. This includes giving your teams all the data they need to drive growth.
Analyze Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators (KPIs), in a business context, are indicators that measure progress toward a strategic goal, normally quantifiable, and tracked using best-in-class BI software. Some of these values might be quantitative KPIs (for example, monthly sales revenue) and easy to assess in number only, either for performance targets or to chart ups and downs. Quantitative KPIs can be an objective measure of performance and, at a minimum, could help reveal what went wrong. In the case of Dalencia, all the factors ultimately concerned the people aspect of the business, caused either directly or indirectly by one person. Pick KPIs that will directly lead to an achievement of a strategic objective, and assess how many of the measures will be easy to record. Select just a few KPIs and bore. Limit your collection of data – what’s too many? Too many will mean that the teams will have no focus and won’t be able to make any meaningful decisions because they will spend too much time on collecting and analysing the data. Additionally, as a business or team (or even an individual in a specific situation), consider using some qualitative analysis with your numbers as it will help you make sense of the results.
Identify Key Success Factors
Even if your startup is very small right now, if you want your sales force to sell according to a written plan, rather than making sales decisions on their gut instincts or educated guesses, you need to build all of the data-oriented approaches necessary to supply your team with their required insights. For instance, sales data can help your representatives save time and effort by identifying the best prospects within a specific group and focusing their attention on those more quickly, and allowing them to avoid spending time and resources on non-ideal prospects. Likewise, data can also enhance customer retention by allowing you to determine the variables that affect customer satisfaction or loyalty, and assess reasons why this may be the case. A data-driven sales strategy must involve some process for data collection and analysis. Once obtained, create a portal where members of your team can easily access trackable sales information, data, trends and inferences, as well as results.
Analyze Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) KPIs (pronounced kye-pee’s) – Know-Pick-Impact Indicators – are metrics that make a difference to your strategic business results. A good KPI tells people your strategic goals, and where to focus to make them happen. Strategic KPIs tend to be more broad-based, addressing the performance of an entire corporation or groups of departments: the inventory turnover ratio (which measures how many dollar units are spent on inventory divided by its value) or customer service metrics such as average resolution time. Look for KPIs that make your company better at what it does over time – whether that’s identifying specific business practices that can be improved over time, or selecting both leading and lagging indicators so that you can determine what’s causing the outcomes (like sales), while also predicting what might be next (like website traffic growth).
