3 Best Practices of Sales Analytics

Growth and predictability. These are the two most common reasons for wanting to build high-performance sales teams, according to Fred Shilmover, CEO of InsightSquared and guru of sales analytics.

In his presentation “Best Practices of Sales Analytics” at the Inside Sales Virtual Summit, Fred proposed three best practices of sales analytics and discussed how InsightSquared implements them.

Here are some of the highlights of Fred’s presentation:

3 Best Practices of Sales Analytics

1. Make it part of your culture

Analytics is not just about tools and spreadsheets. It’s about culture. In order for any analysis to be effective, it needs to be part of your culture. If you are not, on a regular basis, inspecting people’s data in a conspicuous manner, and if you are not integrating it into your pipeline review meetings, your authority as a sales leader will be tenuous at best. Analysis also needs to be timely and relevant. You should not rely on rules of thumb or gut instincts that are not data driven.

2. Coach with metrics

It’s hard to argue with the facts, which is why it’s important to coach with metrics. Your sales analysis needs to go down to the sales rep level, so that you can tailor your coaching and create goals with your sales reps based on individual performance. Know how each sales rep stacks up against the team, then ask metric-based questions and demand data-driven answers.

3. Keep it simple

It’s easy to go too far with sales analytics and want to analyze everything. If you do that, you will quickly get lost in bad analytics. Focus on a certain number of key performance indicators and say no to the rest.

Here are some questions from Fred’s Q&A:

“How do we disseminate information throughout the team?”

Start by just having a whiteboard to display metrics. Measure activities, outcomes, meetings and opportunities, down to deals, and have people see those ratios. Share with the entire company. Be transparent. We believe in a very high degree of transparency at InsightSquared. We share our board desk on the Wiki. Everyone has access to our sales performance, so everyone knows ahead of time what our goals are and what we all are accountable for. We also push a lot of data through email. You can do that out of your CRM.

“For businesses that change a lot, can you implement analytics or should you wait for the changes to happen?”

I could not feel any more strongly about this area. You don’t have to make a massive change in your business to run an experiment. You absolutely have to measure it, and you don’t need to have a control. Create objective measures of what you expect the change to impact and then assess retrospectively.

Want to learn how Fred implements these best practices in his own business? Or listen to the entire presentation? Check out the video above or register for the event with the link below.

 

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