Effective sales operations focus on concentrating reps’ time and attention on the handful of metrics that disproportionately matter – the size of the pipeline, conversion rate, and incentives consistent with the company’s overall sales vision.
Embedding weekly routines and daily expectations of activities reinforces the ultimate goal of driving sales growth. Therefore, sales leaders need to focus on digital and analytics capabilities that deliver on these needs.
Using digital tools is vital to scale solutions across the sales organisation. This includes creating tailored dashboards for all sales personnel as well as decision support metrics and tools to help reps in the field make better decisions.
These don’t need to be overly complex; even quick and dirty solutions can deliver profitable results without waiting for more sophisticated IT investment and development.
Example business issue
A technology company had limited data on sales, margins, and no performance management systems for products sold at the rep level. When it attempted a large transformation that involved capturing new growth, realigning coverage to match opportunities, building frontline capabilities, and redesigning compensation structures, results were slow to arrive and quarterly target pressure did not let up.
Worse, the sales force was so fragmented and dispersed that it was hard for the customer to know whom to call for help. There were more than two dozen sales roles within the function, from account managers to software architects, and the company realised that the right people were seldomly working on the right deals.
The solution
Using a solution like Lian enabled the company to transform their sales operations processes and use analytics and automated report systems to create dashboards personalised for each salesperson:
- The sales operation process redesign resulted in a digital tool within their CRM system that gave sales reps the precise names of the right people to call for any particular deal based on their specific experiences.
- This tool also scrapes email and calendar data to understand what patterns of sales staff interactions are most highly correlated with strong performance – frequency of interactions at each stage of the deal and the specific combinations of people who work well to close and support a deal.
- The personalised dashboards gave reps their top opportunities on a daily basis which helped to prioritise their follow up actions
- The dashboards also introduced transparency from a performance management perspective, allowing managers all the way to Board level to identify the best performing reps, what opportunities they had closed and where reps needed coaching. Reps could also flag where they needed help, which also ensured that priority opportunities got the right level of attention.
- The dashboards and new sales support processes were also used to help sales support staff build capability to drive the most efficient selling process, with experts such as pricing specialists flagging where the hottest opportunities were and also identifying opportunities to cross sell their customers.
This decision to make information available at the individual level – the combination of dashboards and reporting, sales enablement and coaching delivered an enormous impact very quickly: a $55 million uplift in revenues for that quarter using “quick and dirty” tools effectively rather than making enormous investments.