Because Gut Feel Sales Management Doesn’t Cut it in Today’s Economy

Everybody knows that Cloud-based SaaS applications are designed to be simple. This is a breakthrough in the traditional business intelligence (BI) market, which has been marred by complex implementations, expensive consultants, and failed big-bang data warehouse promises. But simplicity is just the first step. For business intelligence to be widely adopted, it must also help people know what to actually analyze and how to interpret the results.

A few months ago we wrote about the fact that sales management and sales operations often don’t know what their sales data is actually telling them. We then wrote a post about the need for basic numeracy, which pointed out that “people have no way of knowing which questions are meaningful ones to ask, and which are meaningless.”

As we head into the closing weeks of 2008 and sales organizations develop plans for 2008, innumeracy, “a term meant to convey a person’s inability to make sense of the numbers that run their lives,” is not a welcome excuse for poor performance in pressure-packed board meetings. This week I’m going to post some of the best-practice sales analytics that our customers have used in these board meetings to highlight trends and deliver transparency into sales performance:

1) How has my pipeline moved since the last board meeting?

I always find it amazing to hear how many sales executives rely on PowerPoint slides as a system of record. Essentially they do a comparison analysis from one board meeting to the next to show trends. Sound familiar? The ability to take snapshots of your pipeline and track deal movement from week to week, month to month, stage to stage, etc. will allow you to pin point risks and opportunities and take action. It will also allow sales management to give a more accurate and complete picture of deal performance to the board.

2) What does my early-mid-late stage pipeline look like over time?

Many sales organizations struggle with transactional data that is either too granular or simply unusable. The result is the old “garbage in, garbage out“ situation when it comes to doing real actionable information analysis. Here’s a dynamic LucidEra report that takes advantage of the ability to create date range segments in order to see the breakdown of your opportunity amounts by stage as well as the percentage of the overall opportunities in your pipeline. Beside it you can see another commonly used board report that shows you the distribution of your pipeline over the next 6 months.

Next up I’ll write about opportunity leakage and net change pipeline reports. In the meantime, I hope this gives you some ideas that will help you improve your next board slide presentation and move beyond gut-feel sales management in your company.

posted by Darren Cunningham at 12:42 pm

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