Sales data has revolutionized how sales leaders manage their sales force. Few years ago sales leaders used to strive in understanding their sales performance by analyzing their sales based on various criteria (product, area, category, salesperson, customer) in comparison to previous years and in best case trying to manage their sales pipelines.
Technology Reveals More Info
With today’s technology, we are able to crawl and scrape on and transform untapped sales data that could take many forms and sources, stored in the salespeople’s calendar, email, phone calls, handheld machines, company’s website, and many other platforms to be included within our analysis. This has pushed sales leaders to shift from the normal business analysis to what we call sales analytics; and to reach out to such untapped sales data, and build analytical models that will reflect the impact and correlation between sales efforts, and customer shifts and trends on the final sales outcome.
Today’s Shift to Sales Analytics
Therefore, sales leaders today have shifted their solutions toward a more scientific approach where they focus on optimizing the allocation of their salespeople’s effort and ways to better drive their marketing resources. In other words, they are looking to guide their salespeople to work smarter, not only harder, thus dividing their time more efficiently among customers, products, and sales activities.
Furthermore, they are looking to predict their customers needs and behaviour so they could tailor their marketing messages and reach them more effectively.
3 Tools to excavate your golden data and drive your Sales
With this shift, I thought of sharing some tools in a new breed of solutions that will take your sales performance to a next level, aid you to leverage on your data and untapped sales data for better visibility, and to change the culture and actions of frontline sales representatives in ways that dramatically improve sales productivity and effectiveness.
1.
The FitBit for sales professionals. It is an Artificial Intelligence platform that crawls and scrapes on salespeople’s calendar, browser, email, phone metadata to analyze how sales people collaborate and spend their time on selling and non-selling activities. It provides a high-resolution dataset that shows how the sales capacity, time, and efforts are being deployed across the different customer segments, opportunities, stages within the sales process, and much more.
Such insights could aid sales managers to analyze how to optimize the selling time and efforts of their salespeople. This data could be your gold mine to optimize your sales process, and identify how to focus on high-priority customers, and digest bottlenecks.
Sales leaders are eager to benchmark their KPIs and sales performance on a daily basis, and to know what is actually happening in their sales organization. But the real challenge underlies in knowing the reason behind what’s happening at a speed of thought: is it the sales people, their activities, or the product, the competition, the price, or the marketing?
Tableau is a self-service Intelligence platform that allows you to connect to different data sources in an objective to give you the capacity to easily understand such data and its correlation. It allows business executives to analyze, visualize, and answer any question within seconds, thus driving the organization to move beyond surface-level analytics but into using data to challenge the thinking rather than just affirm it.
Nothing could describe it better than seeing it in action > link
3.
My third solution works on predictive analytics, thus aiding business people to use different types of sales data exhaust to predict anything related to their sales. As the best in class self service application, it aids analysts to:
Build an automated sales forecasting process based on predictive modelling rather than any traditional historical based, that will increase accuracy within your sales targets, and forecasts.
Predict your clients’ behaviour, next action, and actual needs especially when it comes to managing accounts espin business models like FMCG, Printing Industry, etc.
Build market basket analysis that can give multidimensional insights about your customers behaviour, needs and best buy especially when it comes to B2C business model (insurance, banking) as well as Retail.
We aid companies to deploy the holistic solution with a vision of bringing the sales organization to become a self reliant and data driven, by connecting the different nodes together from sales activities to predicting the sales forecasts and customer behavior.
For a complete solution or a specific objective, HEED sales consultants and data scientists team comes in to understand your business, identify the KPIs and the related sales matrix, deploy the right platform, build the required hypothesis to turn the set data into valuable, practical and actionable insights, and drive user adoption.
Founder of HEED, a sales management consulting firm focusing on aiding companies to structure, transform or optimize their sales by integrating science into selling and everything related to sales analysis, analytics, and predictive modelling. E. mazen@logicshape.com T. +961 1 649555 Ext. 6661
Mazen is an expert and strategic consultant in Sales Management and Revenue Growth. He’s the Managing Partner and Founder of HEED, a management consulting firm with offices in Dubai and Beirut. He has successfully led and aided many transformation projects with a diversified portfolio mainly in the MENA region.
