During a recent discussion on the future of sales, Gartner analyst Tiffani Bova reminds us that the most disruptive aspect of the market today is not technology – it’s the customer.
With so much information and analysis available to buyers online, customers have grown more confident in their own research abilities and decision-making. As a result, we’ve come to understand that the customer now leads the sales process and the role of the sales rep has changed, perhaps forever.
The transfer of power means that sales people must engage with buyers on a whole new level, providing greater value at every stage of the sales cycle than ever before.
What it Means to “Engage”
According to research published in the Harvard Business Review, the most successful reps today share a small number of common traits. Among these is the amount of time spent with customers.
The research concludes that the highest revenue producers spend up to 33% more time with customers per week, which, depending on the company, adds up to an additional 3-4 hours. This not only includes overall time spent with customers, but also factors in the number of accounts touched, time spent with each, frequency of interactions, and breadth and depth of relationships built within them.
Further analysis revealed that the degree of focus on the customer matters as much or more than total time. For example, in one large B2B technology company, top performers spent 18% more time with customers per week. Yet they interacted with 40% fewer accounts over the course of a quarter allowing them to spend more time with each of those accounts relative to lower performers.
In other words, depth trumps breadth when it comes to accounts – top sellers focused on building deeper relationships with fewer customers rather than casting a wider net of shallower engagement.
If this sounds reasonable, it also begs the question: even if the average rep spends more time with customers, how do they come by the depth and skill level that today’s buyers expect and appreciate?
Can Your Sales Data Get the Job Done?
The answer to the first part of this equation is probably something you’re already doing. Most teams rely heavily on sales activity reporting, together with lead and opportunity management capabilities in their CRM. All of these either track or point to the level of effort a rep invests in managing a particular account.
But how can you know from your CRM if reps have the depth and skill required? Most measures of this are in the rear-view. They are neither predictive nor forward-looking, which means there is little room to influence them. They are based on transactional reporting, such as pipeline development, forecasts and quota attainment.
Financial metrics alone don’t convey correct behavior or sales skill. When metrics of sales rep understanding are matched to other performance data, however, the power of your sales analytics strategy becomes plainly obvious.
Take objection handling, for example. Prospects will often give you more than one reason not to buy, and it’s your job to be prepared to answer these objections, questions and concerns, close the loop, and move the deal to close.
Imagine for a second that a sales manager can see (at a glance) that reps who are underperforming are also struggling to understand positioning on a new product.
Or perhaps conversely, to explore the characteristics of their district or regional successes, and gain insight into other actions the management team can take to grow the business, such as combining teams to leverage strengths across territories.
Leading indicator data such as sales acumen and objection handling – combined with structured, lagging indicator data such as profitability, net new customers acquired, etc. – creates actionable information.
By analyzing the skills and attributes of high performers in the present, organizations can build a template for future results. Predictive sales performance analytics are much more useful because they ask questions in order to change the outcome, not simply report on it.
Time for a Change
In the new buying environment, companies need to think about data that reflects the capabilities of their sales force as a durable strategic asset.
People and sales processes are of course far more complex and we’re certainly not going to capture a 100% perfect picture of our sales force capabilities, but we can move from knowing almost nothing in any objective sense (other than rear view mirror metrics) to something that lets us begin to identify where the gaps are and begin to address them proactively.
If your systems don’t deliver a real-time understanding of what the field knows and what they are prepared to bring to every customer interaction, perhaps it’s time to fire your old sales analytics strategy – and get a new one?
Now that’s disruptive.