5 Habits of Data-Driven Sales Departments

Sales departments in modern businesses have perhaps the most pressure on them to succeed; the entire business’ success or failure depends in large part on whether the sales folks can get their jobs done.

Those same departments process a huge amount of information in any given day or week. There’s data about the interactions each sales representative has with potential customers, data about how much activity each sales rep conducts throughout the day, data about whether reps are projected to meet their individual monthly and quarterly goals. The most effective and efficient sales departments use this data to their advantage by interpreting the data to discover the habits and patterns in their organization that aren’t working as well as possible.

These data-driven sales departments—from the VP of Sales down to the intern who’s setting meetings for the sales reps—have several habits and tactics that help them succeed. Sales departments that want to optimize their processes without needing to add headcount should look at these habits and compare them to what’s being done today.

1. Track every action

The first habit that effective sales departments have in common is a willingness and capacity to track every action of their day-to-day operations. Every action a rep takes in the process of converting a lead, every response a prospect triggers, every conversation a customer has with a support team member… everything needs to be recorded.

The goal is to use analytics to uncover the patterns in the behaviors of the sales team, management team, and customer base. Those patterns are the key to making the adjustments needed to really supercharge the department. They can upend a business’ entire sales model, but only if there’s enough data to analyze in the first place.

This isn’t to say that everything needs to be tracked manually. There are tools that can take care of most of that automatically. Logging emails, notating phone calls, even dialing the phone—all of that can be done without any real manual intervention, freeing up the sales team to focus on getting revenue.

Having all of the data available for analysis means a business can respond to it quickly and take the actions necessary to succeed.

2. Define KPIs and provide tools to learn more

Making something useful out of all of that data is an entirely different challenge from collecting it. If everything is being recorded, how do you know which measurements are worth paying attention to and which are just window-dressing?

The answer is that effective sales departments are managed in large part by their KPIs, the specific metrics that managers choose to set as targets for their reps. But choosing the right KPIs to motivate and accurately measure the team’s performance isn’t as simple a task as it sounds. For example, a business may find that measuring the number of calls per day is less indicative of sales performance than measuring how much time each rep spends connected to prospects and customers each day.

It’s critical that a business’ chosen KPIs are well-known throughout the organization, visible, and

reviewed frequently by everybody on the team. This gives the entire organization the opportunity to understand how each team member contributed to the overall results or learn why the company’s performance may not have been as expected. High-performing sales organizations don’t wait for reports to check in on their KPIs, they have real-time access to the analytical tools to get it immediately.

3. Stay current

The effective data-driven sales organization makes a commitment to staying current with their technological solutions. It may be tempting for a team to say “it’s not broken, let’s not fix it,” but that perspective prevents businesses from taking advantage of new features and functionalities available in updates.

Sometimes, that means not being married to a platform the organization has been using for a lengthy period of time. Staying current may not mean staying with the vendor you’re with. Data-driven sales departments are agile and flexible, and if another vendor has a solution with a compelling feature or characteristic, they don’t hesitate to make a switch.

That said, this doesn’t mean organizations should jump blindly into new updates. Allow a reasonable amount of time for an update to filter into the market to prevent any bugs from disrupting the process. But don’t skip upgrades.

Making an effort to stay current with technology is similar to making an effort to make incoming data the driving factor in sales team development: as new information comes in, the decision-makers constantly reevaluate their existing choices for continued suitability.

4. Keep it simple

When a business is using a powerful analytics tool, it’s incredibly tempting to overload dashboards and analyses with every piece of data that could be useful to someone. That’s a mistake. More data and more info per analysis or dashboard is not better.

Analyses and dashboards are the vehicle by which raw information becomes actionable knowledge, but those very dashboards have to be understandable to be useful. Complex visualization and hyper-detailed analyses that try to explore every element of a particular question aren’t useful. If it takes more than a minute to explain what’s in the dashboard, it’s not a good dashboard.

Simple is beautiful. Keep analyses limited to one question, don’t over complicate them in an effort to answer everything, and don’t be drawn in by complex visualizations. Make more analyses to answer more questions, rather than trying to consolidate everything into a single screen.

5. Prime the pump

The best data-driven sales departments don’t just learn from and act on the data that they generate, they use that information to inspire the team members to continue to succeed. It’s only a small jump to use analyses and reports as tools to foster a healthy competitive spirit among the sales team.

Hang monitors around the sales bullpen and display a series of revolving analyses, each of which identifies a different aspect of how the team is performing. Cycle from an analysis of each team member’s projected revenue generation for the quarter to an analysis with the percentage of revenue each member is responsible for, to an analysis of the company’s penetration into each representative’s geographic market.

Mix in illustrative metrics and dashboards that apply to the industry or culture of the company. Data-driven sales representatives will respond to the information on these dashboards as a challenge and strive to get their own name listed atop the rankings.

In summary

Data-driven sales organizations never stop learning: learning from the data available, from the technologies they work with, from their colleagues, and from their customers. Businesses that want a data-driven sales department find the people who are inspired by numbers to fill that role.

Dave Boulet brings more than 27 years of technology and sales leadership experience to TARGIT. His passion is expanding companies and building high performance sales and partner teams that focus on delivering real value to clients in his role as CSO.