5 STEPS TO MORE DATA-DRIVEN SALES MANAGEMENT Steps-D… · 5 STEPS TO MORE . DATA-DRIVEN SALES...

5 STEPS TO MORE DATA-DRIVEN SALES MANAGEMENT As a sales leader, you now have more data than ever at your fingertips. Add to that the advances in AI and machine learnings and sales can sometimes feel like more of a science than an art. Here is our five-step guide to taking a data-driven approach to sales management.

5 STEPS TO MORE DATA-DRIVEN SALES MANAGEMENT 2

Table of ContentsStep 1: Hire the right team for the job . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Tie Sales Job Descriptions to Company Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Expand Your Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Don’t Leave Interviewing to Chance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Benchmark Your Talent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Hire from Within . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

Step 2: Invest in an effective onboarding process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

The Accidental Salesperson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Tailor Your Sales Onboarding Program . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Understand a Day in the Life of a Successful Salesperson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Step 3: Measure the team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Automate as Much as Possible . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Establish the Right KPIs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Drive Healthy Competition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Step 4: Provide ongoing coaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

How Data Identi�es Coachable Moments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Multithreading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Executive Stakeholder Engagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Aging Deals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

The Importance of Ongoing Coaching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Step 5: Use activity data to promote (or not) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

First, Identify The Top Performers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Next, Look for Signs of Disengagement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Take a Regular Employee Engagement Pulse-Check . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

The Future of Sales Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

About People.ai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17


YOUR JOB AS A SALES LEADER IS EVER-EVOLVING . With more data than ever available to you, and advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, your job has possibly even hit the tipping point of being more of a science than an art .

But there’s a downside to all this advancement . Now there’s even more data to wade through than ever . And it can be time-consuming and expensive to keep up with the latest must-have sales management tools and best practices .

You don’t have time for trial-and-error . Whether you’re promoted into a sales leadership position or starting a sales management role with a new employer, you’re expected to hit the ground running immediately .

That’s why we’ve put together this five-step guide to taking a data-driven approach to sales management . We’ve included insights from our proprietary platform data plus key data from respected industry resources to help you build your own high-performance sales team .

If you need support along the way, we can help . Join our data-driven sales and marketing group on Facebook and share your challenges with our community .


Hire the right team for the job

Do you know what characteristics your more successful salespeople share? Is it a passion for your industry? A keen ability to connect with prospects through social selling? Identifying the right champions? Knowing how to multi-thread to get a deal done?

Similarly, what characteristics do the salespeople who churned in less than a year have in common? Did they share a common former background, such as previous industry or company? Did they lean on a speci�c sales activity (emails vs cold calls) harder than others?

It’s important to answer these questions not from gut feelings but from data. Further, it’s important to look at what will make a salesperson successful in the organization’s future, based on your current business goals. Once you have a good sense of those three elements, here’s what to consider above and beyond the candidates:

Tie Sales Job Descriptions to Company GoalsAs your business evolves, identify the skill sets you need to meet your near-term and long-term goals. What would the perfect salesperson bring to the table that the entire team would bene�t from? De�ne this in your job descriptions so that candidates (and your interview panel) know exactly what you’re looking for.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT CHARACTERISTICS YOUR

MORE SUCCESSFUL SALESPEOPLE SHARE?

1STEP


Look for candidates who not only have the skills you need but who have a track record of being able to coach and train their colleagues around those skills . For example, are you making a move to sell into a different segment or industry? Bringing on team members who have done this in the past means they can begin adding value to the team from day one, even while they are still ramping .

Expand Your NetworkA-players attract other A-players . Incent your salespeople to refer top-performing colleagues from their former companies . But don’t put all the referral compensation upfront . Provide additional payouts over key milestones such as the first 90 days and 1-year anniversary of the candidate’s start date . That way, the referring employee has a vested interest in ensuring the success of your new hire .

Don’t Leave Interviewing to ChanceYou’ve heard the phrase “hire slow, fire fast .” This requires having a well thought through recruiting plan .

First, identify the key qualities of the role you’re hiring for, and create questions that map to each of those qualities . For example, are you looking for strong prospecting skills, a negotiation expert, or a quintessential Challenger? Script your recruiter’s screening calls to identify these areas . And, provide focus areas and interview questions to your interviewers to make sure everyone is probing for candidates who meet those qualities you’ve identified .

Consider having at least one panel interview, with three colleagues asking a set of questions . This both helps weed out individual candidate bias and tests how well the candidate does under pressure .

Benchmark Your TalentConsider using a sales assessment “test” to benchmark your existing team, and the ability to measure candidates against it while they are on site . While your salespeople may be initially wary about being asked to complete an assessment, once you explain how you’ll use it to bring on other team members who are a good fit, they’re likely to come around .

An assessment’s biggest benefit is that it’s often a better representation of the candidate’s skills and strengths . A resume can be hired out, but their on-the-spot responses to an assessment can’t be gamed . If that candidate gets hired, an

CONSIDER USING A SALES ASSESSMENT ‘TEST’

TO BENCHMARK YOUR EXISTING TEAM .


assessment can also provide immediate areas for coaching opportunities to take them from good to great .

Hire from WithinDon’t forget to look internally for top candidates . Just because you can’t think of anyone who might be interested in a new role on the sales team doesn’t mean there isn’t someone internal who’s potentially a good fit—especially for more entry level sales roles .

There could be an SDR, a customer success manager, or even a member of the marketing team who could potentially transfer their company knowledge to your role . If your company has a culture of internal mobility, ensure that there’s a process in place to support those moves, and a way for current employees to find out about other opportunities with the company . After all, you want to do everything you can to hold onto your company’s top performers .

Once you’ve found the right candidate and they’ve accepted the offer, the hard part kicks in: executing an onboarding process that works .


Invest in an effective onboarding process

Bringing a new salesperson onto your sales team costs a good deal more than just the recruiter’s fees and their salary. Data from entrepreneur David Skok suggests that in a SaaS company, it can take between 12 and 18 months before the company breaks even on a new sales hire. And at the worst point of the salesperson’s ramp, the company is down $150,000 in investment in that employee.

Although companies often hire salespeople with experience in their industry or selling similar products or services, as this �gure

2STEP

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Net Profit

Worst loss:$190K in

month 11

First profitablemonth: 21

[Source: http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-economics-2/]


illustrates they don’t immediately hit the ground running . New hires need to understand what makes your offering different from the competition, and how to talk with your target customers to reflect an understanding of their needs and objectives . And they aren’t going to be able to pick that up on their own .

There are several schools of thought on how to calculate your average ramp time . In addition to the time to profitability model deployed above, some sales leaders use the length of their sales cycle plus 90 days as their benchmark . While this is a simple formula, it requires you know your average sales cycle length, and that your sales process is simple enough to be mastered in such a short amount of time .

Another factor to consider is your new hire may not have a traditional sales background, which in turn can mean needing additional training . Other ways to calculate ramp time are the time it takes the average rep to hit their full quota, or the time at which it takes for a rep to be put onto their full quota .

The Accidental SalespersonRecent research from Hubspot suggests your sales team may be expecting their employer to be their primary source of training . Interestingly, only 39% intentionally went into sales as a career .

How do you try to improve as a sales person? (by intention to pursue sales roles)

Those who did not intend to pursue sales are less likely to seek training outside of work. Managers and internal resources are extremely important in ensuring their success.

Base: 420 sales professionals in the US, UK, and Ireland Source: Hubspot Sales Survey Q1, 2017

38%25%

36%36%

35%21%

28%18%

24%25%

22%

22%

20%17%

12%16%

15%8%

23%

27%

Attend sales networking events

Attend company sponsored sales training

Attend in person sales conference

Attend virtual sales events/webinars

One on one coaching with my manager

One on one coaching with my peers

Read sales books

Read sales blogs

Seek out my own sales training or hire a personal

None of the above

Intended to go into sales Did not intend to go into sales

[Source: https://research .hubspot .com/charts/sales-intention-training]

Those who did not intend to pursue sales are less likely to seek training outside of work . Managers and internal resources are extremely important in ensuring their success .


Why does this matter? According to the same research, salespeople who “fell into” their role are less likely to proactively pursue career development on their own time . In fact, 23% reported they didn’t participate in any activities to improve as a salesperson .

For these employees, the sales training you provide during the onboarding process is likely to be their only professional development outside of one-on-one coaching from their manager and peers .

This makes the case for supplementing your sales onboarding program with a regular cadence of required sales trainings throughout the year . In addition to building a culture of continuous learning within your sales organization, you’ll ensure that the top topics are front and center throughout the year—not just during their first few weeks . Otherwise, your less-motivated salespeople may be out the door due to poor performance within their first year—well before you’ve recouped your hiring costs .

Tailor Your Sales Onboarding ProgramWhile it may be tempting to hire a consultant to produce a few videos or printed materials for your sales onboarding program, the truth is that no two sales teams are the same . Further, within your sales team, no two salespeople have the same background, strengths, or weaknesses . So, a cookie-cutter sales onboarding program isn’t going to be effective .

An effective sales onboarding program needs to be built around your sales process, your product and messaging, and based on analysis of your sales activity data . With that data in-hand, your program should:

• Train new salespeople on the best practices for a successful sales cycle at your company, and share what your best salespeople are doing differently

• Arm them with what they need to know about the product and how to speak about it with prospects

• Get them up to speed on the internal tools they’ll need to do their job

• Be available in the format—live, audio, video, or text—that works best for each individual

AN EFFECTIVE SALES ONBOARDING PROGRAM NEEDS

TO BE BUILT AROUND YOUR SALES PROCESS, YOUR PRODUCT

AND MESSAGING, AND BASED ON ANALYSIS OF YOUR SALES

ACTIVITY DATA .


• Improve targeted skills that are critical to the both the company’s and the individual’s success, such as prospecting skills, or presentation or demo skills

• Be measurable . Who completed the full onboarding program? How do you correlate completion of courses to the performance of salespeople and teams? How do you identify skills that a new hire will need to continue working on as they ramp?

• Evolve over time . The way your company goes to market today, and the best practices of your salespeople today, are likely to evolve over time . Adapt your program as needed to ensure the continued success of your sales team

By deeply understanding the current activities and best practices of your sales team, you can create a tailored, effective sales onboarding program .

Understand a Day in the Life of a Successful SalespersonWe recently analyzed our platform data to identify what activities defined closed won opportunities versus closed lost . The stereotypical image of a successful salesperson involves having a phone glued to their hand . But that’s not what the data shows . Rather, modern salespeople are engaging in a variety of activities on a daily basis .

On average, salespeople spend 78% of their time in emails, 16% in meetings, and 6% on calls . This activity adds up to an average of 246 minutes (or 4 .1 hours) spent on each closed won opportunity . This workload includes an average of 34 .63 emails for every closed won opportunity .

This data will, of course, vary for every organization, but it’s a good starting point for teams to use to benchmark against .

Take the time to identify what activities correlate to a closed won deal in your own organization . Is there always a meeting with an executive sponsor? Multi-threading? Champions in a certain department? A certain number of calls that lead to a first meeting?

As a component of your new sales onboarding program, provide new hires—inside salespeople in particular—with benchmarks for how to spend their time, and how they will be measured . What does success look like for a new employee in the first 90 days? 6 months? The first year? How will you track that activity? And how does that compare to the expectations for a seasoned veteran on the team? Transparency in this area is critical for creating a high-performance sales team .

ON AVERAGE, SALESPEOPLE SPEND

78% OF THEIR TIME IN EMAILS, 16% IN MEETINGS, AND

6% ON CALLS .


Measure the team Chances are you have a number of tools you use to monitor your sales team’s performance. Unfortunately, while 75% of salespeople understand the importance of the sales tools you provide, more than half (55%) found the usage of sales tools to be more of an obstacle than an enabler of sales performance.

So how do you �nd the happy medium between capturing the data you need to run your business, and enabling your sales team to perform their job without friction? Here are a few ideas.

Automate as Much as PossibleIf you want to keep your salespeople focused on selling, but still want to understand the progress they are making on their leads, accounts, and opportunities, start by automating as much of the sales process as possible. After all, your salespeople joined your team to sell, not to spend hours every week on data entry.

You can now automate the capture of activity such as emails sent, meetings scheduled or completed, contacts engaged with, and much more, and automatically get that data into your CRM without a salesperson having to do a thing.

Once you are automatically capturing key sales activities, you can easily create a benchmark for the ideal activities needed along a successful sales process. This data can, in turn, affect the way your salespeople spend their days, and how they decide the right next steps with each account or opportunity.

3STEP


Establish the Right KPIsIn addition to the number of closed won deals, sales leaders will want to identify and track the right KPIs to measure the overall health of the sales organization, such as:

• Average length of a sales cycle

• Average deal size and/or seat price

• Performance against monthly, quarterly, and yearly pipeline and revenue targets

• Conversion rate from lead (MQL) to opportunity (SQL)

• Conversion rate from opportunity (SQL) to close

• Competitive win rates

KPIs are not one-size-fits-all and will depend on the overall goals of the company, so you’ll want to take the time to identify the right metrics for your sales team . Once you’ve established those KPIs, you’ll be able to assess each salesperson’s performance against these metrics—rather than measuring primarily on quota attainment .

Drive Healthy Competition What’s your first reaction when you see a leaderboard? Regardless of its purpose, most of us want to be in the leader position . After all, who doesn’t want to see their name in lights, especially if that means a reward is at stake?

Competition, when done well, can motivate employees in a number of ways, including sales goal attainment—and salespeople are motivated by clear targets . Make sure everyone understands how they will be measured above and beyond attaining quota . Give them access to a tool or a leaderboard that shows them how they are tracking against their goals, and compared to their peers .

Once it’s clear how your team is performing, it’s time to take a deep dive into their individual career development with a training and coaching plan that’s tailored to their strengths and skill gaps .


Provide ongoing coaching

See: http://www.insightsquared.com/2017/04/metrics-driven-sales-coaching/

Once a new salesperson is onboarded, and you’ve established the KPIs by which you’ll be measuring them, the hard work isn’t yet done. You need to manage to those KPIs, and when salespeople are veering off course, provide relevant feedback and coaching.

How Data Identi�es Coachable MomentsWithout data, your sales coaching is based on qualitative feedback and hunches. With data, you can make it prescriptive and tailored to a salesperson and their behavior. Here are a few speci�c areas data can identify that merit a speci�c coaching conversation.

MultithreadingA successful sale requires the support of more than one champion within the organization. Salespeople who engaged in multithreading, i.e. working the sale through multiple key contacts within the company, were more likely to close their deals. Speci�cally, our data has shown won opportunities have twice as many contacts involved with the deal.

If your data shows a salesperson is consistently working with only one contact for each account, make time to talk to them about the importance of multi-threading to closing deals, and share best practices for how to do it.

4STEP


Executive Stakeholder EngagementClosely tied to multi-threading, executive stakeholder engagement is another important lever in closing deals. Although the speci�cs vary by organization—such as how many days before proposed close date does a meeting need to be held with an executive—a deal without any executive engagement is unlikely to close, especially when a signi�cant amount of budget is on the line.

Aging DealsIf your average sales cycle is 180 days, and a salesperson has a number of deals of that age that aren’t very far along in the cycle, they likely aren’t going to close. Similarly, if your deals typically stay two weeks in the evaluation stage, and a deal has been there for a month, it may need to be deprioritized. Coach the salesperson on your team’s benchmarks and help them identify and prioritize accounts that are more in line with your team’s successful close criteria.

The Importance of Ongoing CoachingWhile your data will uncover speci�c one-off teachable moments, it’s important to establish a repeatable process for providing ongoing coaching and goals—not just a yearly review. If you meet with a salesperson every week, designate one of those meetings each month as a dashboard review where you go through their pipeline together, or dedicate it to a speci�c coaching topic.

When you identify an issue the salesperson is having, it’s important that you, as the sales leader and coach, do more than just send the salesperson out the door with a task of “�xing” the problem. It’s important to take a more hands-on approach to sales coaching to show them it’s a team effort and model the desired behavior.

Participating in meetings or calls with the salesperson is one of the best ways to provide valuable, individualized coaching. Depending on the issue, you may need to lead the meeting with the salesperson as an observer to model ideal behaviors. In other situations, it may be appropriate for you to be a silent observer and provide constructive feedback immediately after the meeting.

By building these sorts of activities into your regular sales management routine, you’ll no longer have any end of the year unpleasant review surprises. And you may even be able to better assign territories and accounts to individual salespeople’s strengths, and minimize churn of the team.

PARTICIPATING IN MEETINGS OR CALLS WITH

THE SALESPERSON IS ONE OF THE BEST WAYS TO PROVIDE VALUABLE,

INDIVIDUALIZED COACHING.


Use activity data to promote (or not)

Your employees are everything to your business. That’s why every smart business leader spends time, money, and effort to keep their employees happy.

By analyzing your team’s activity data, you can identify patterns that signify highly engaged employees who are ready to take on more responsibility, and other patterns that may reveal a team member who is disengaged.

First, Identify The Top PerformersIt’s easy to identify your current engaged employee patterns—just look at the activity data for your most productive team members. Who’s closing the most deals in the least amount of time? Who is engaging the most with their accounts (successfully)? Who’s proactively coaching other employees on what they’ve learned works to close sales in your organizations? Who’s hitting quota early in the quarter or year?

These are all leading indicators that you have a rockstar performer who may be ready for a new challenge. Rather than letting the competition be the one who bene�ts from this by luring them away with a bigger job and more impressive title, schedule regular career development discussions with those high performers and identify their ideal career path and determine what you can do to help them attain it.

5STEP


Next, Look for Signs of DisengagementIt’s a little more difficult to identify the actively disengaged employees, but it can be done . Because of the large impact negative employees can have on the rest of the team, monitoring for employee disengagement is more important than you may think .

Compile a comprehensive activity dataset of previously churned employees and compare it to the ones that are currently thriving and train models on those . Things to look for include:

• Has someone’s weekly activity dropped? For example, did they used to have 10 meetings per week and are now doing 3?

• Are you seeing fewer touches on their assigned accounts?

• Do their deals take longer to close than they used to?

• Is the contact data missing from most of their accounts?

Check-in with the employees you then identify as at-risk and have some hard conversations . Can that employee relationship be saved, or is it better for both parties to part ways?

Take a Regular Employee Engagement Pulse-CheckIn many organizations, high turnover on the sales team seems to be the norm . It can seem easy enough to replace the salespeople who leave, so it doesn’t seem like a big issue outside of the recruitment costs . But according to Josh Bersin of Bersin by Deloitte, the total cost of losing an employee can range from tens of thousands of dollars to 1 .5-2X annual salary . This makes maintaining an engaged workforce a mission critical task, not a “nice to have .”

Keeping up employee engagement and evaluating potential employee churn isn’t a one-and-done project . You’ll want to continue to score employees in real time for happy vs unhappy indexes (just like lead scoring), and pay close attention to both your positive and negative outliers . Provide these results to your sales managers on a weekly basis, to be incorporated into their regular individual coaching sessions .

It can seem overwhelming to get all that data into a normalized format, but it can be done . And once you put it to use, you’ll make your employees happier and turbocharge your business growth .

© 2018 People.ai All rights reserved. | https://people.ai | (888) 997-3675 | [email protected] - 5 Steps to More Data-Driven Sales Management - 201801

The Future of Sales ManagementThanks to innovations in machine learning and arti�cial intelligence, you now have increased transparency into the path to success and how to help your sales team get there. Robust sales activity data combined with insights into what the ideal closed won deal looks like provide you with more accurate forecasts and the ability to better match the right salespeople with the right roles, territories, and accounts for their skill sets.

If you aren’t using data to drive your sales management process, you may be leaving a lot of opportunity on the table—that your competitors will happily scoop up.

We encourage you to use the data points we’ve provided from our platform as benchmarks, and hope they inspire you to take a deeper dive into your own data to identify what success looks like in your own organization. If you need help with that, we’re here to help.

About People.aiPeople.ai is the AI platform for data-driven sales and marketing. We give sales leaders a complete picture of sales activities and leverage AI to help them manage their teams based on hard data, rather than assumptions. Marketing teams gain visibility into how their leads move through the funnel after being passed to sales, allowing them to attribute sales activity to the right leads, campaigns, and opportunities. With AI, People.ai is �nally bridging the gap between sales and marketing.

People.ai is headquartered in San Francisco, CA and is backed by Y Combinator and Silicon Valley’s top investors, including Lightspeed, Shasta Ventures, and Index Ventures. Customers include Lyft, Gainsight, and PandaDoc. For more information follow us on Twitter @ppl_ai or visit us at https://people.ai/.

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