Sales professionals rely on intuition, their natural charisma, sheer force of will or anything that gives them the edge to win. However, these qualities are no longer enough.
You need data. And lots of it.
In light of the digital transformation B2B sales has undergone, the power of data cannot be ignored. Data is what tells us what is working, what areas need to be improved and what new sales strategies one should experiment with and implement.
The goal for all sales teams is to turn data into information, and information into insight. This is how you can incorporate data driven sales processes into your sales strategy.
Let us take a look at 4 simple things you can do to implement data-driven sales in your teams.
#1 Track your activities
A. Historical Calls
One of the biggest assets any sales team has is their repository of sales calls recordings. By using conversational intelligence software you can gain insights into the reasons a deal was closed (win or loss).
For example: Gong helps analyze interactions across phone, email, and web conferencing to give your team the insights they need to close more deals. With conversational intelligence you can see different patterns arise in your data. Some of the data points you can analyze are-
- How many calls per week resulted in how many meetings?
- How many of the meetings scheduled were no shows?
- How many of these meetings led to opportunities created?
- Sales cycle length for each of the deals.
B. Sales Playbook
A sales playbook is a bible (of sorts) to maintain best practices, sales techniques, tactics, and strategies that are employed during different stages of the sales cycle. This document guides sales reps on what to do in specific situations, such as during prospecting, nurturing, or pitching.
The easiest way to ensure that your sales playbook does its job is by making sure that it is regularly updated based on data derived from analyzing historical calls.
If you do not have a sales playbook in place, you can download this free sales playbook template to set up your very own.
#2 Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting is an important component of any sales strategy. It helps you to estimate future revenue that can be generated by your sales teams for the next month, quarter, or year. Forecasting can be derived from historical data, industry trends and the state of your current sales pipeline.
Looking at your historical data of sales (closed won), you can see what industry your leads belong to, how large their company is (firmographic data), and make inferences that will allow you to chase high intent prospects.
Forecasting also allows you to set data-driven goals for you and your sales teams to achieve for the quarter if not for the whole year.
#3 Automate data enrichment in your CRM
A successful data-driven sales team works intimately with a customer relationship management tool (CRM) such as HubSpot. Your CRM data is priceless as it effectively replaces spreadsheets and helps you generate sales reports.
It allows you to capture demographic & geographic info, gain additional data about leads, and more. For example, when a form is filled you get additional information about your prospects such as where they work, or where they live or their email address. All this information can be stored in one place. These details about leads can then be used to nurture the same.
Another option is to sync your CRM with a data intelligence software such as Slintel which provides you with contact information, technographic, firmographics, and psychographic data.
When you automate your data collection with all the data from your CRM and data intelligence software, you can identify which leads fit into your ICP. Apart from this, you can implement lead qualification and scoring to identify which leads can be won successfully.
The most important aspect of automating this process is that it saves time, effort, and personnel which otherwise need to be dedicated just for this process.
#4 Sales Enablement
Another aspect of data-driven sales process is to establish a proper resource for all your sales enablement needs. A tool like GTM Buddy allows you to get AI-driven insights on which case study, white paper, and more are most contextually relevant to your customers.
It also provides which of the sales enablement resources were fetched by your sales teams, which product marketing collaterals were shared with your prospects. Having all your sales enablement resources in one place also helps you identify other types of resources your product marketing teams can create and work on.
That’s a wrap folks!
Just intuition or sales savviness is no longer enough to power your sales teams. Embracing data driven-sales will not only align your sales teams to work in sync but also help you streamline your sales processes to optimize them to influence your revenue.
By simply implementing these 4 steps in your sales strategy, you can embrace data-driven sales which in turn will help improve your RoI.
Let us know what are some of the methods that you use to make your sales teams data-driven.
