The Science of Sales Analytics

1. Marketing and Sales Levers
2013 New Years Resolution – The Science of Sales
2013 and the Future of Sales Management
The amount of data in our world has been
exploding, and analyzing large data sets or Big
Data will become a key basis for new product
development, competitive analysis, sales
productivity growth, and sales / marketing
innovation. This generates a shift that leaders in every sector will have to grapple
with the implications of big data, not just a few managers that are data-oriented. The
increasing volume and detail of information captured by sales CRM, marketing
multimedia, social media, and the Internet will fuel exponential growth in
sales analytics for the foreseeable future.
The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual
firms. From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value, all
companies need to take big data seriously. In most industries, established
competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate,
compete, and capture value from deep and up-to-real-time information and those
who do not will be at a large disadvantage.
Sales Analytics is a New Discipline that in 3 Years Will Be Better Understood
Compared to other business functions such as
marketing or supply chain Big Data, the use of
analytics (the analysis of Big Data) in sales is still in its
infancy. However, there is a new desire to inject
more analytics into the sales process. The increased
availability and sophistication of this new capabilities
and the simple necessity are driving new sales best
practices that improve the quality of data and results
in a higher quality of analytics adoption.
Once a company recognizes the potential of analytics
to improve its sales performance, its first

2. consideration is where and how to apply analytics capabilities across the end- to-end
sales process, from customer segmentation and planning through to post-sales
support. There are many variations of sales analytics that can be applied at different
points along the sales process. As with most significant change initiatives, you have
to start somewhere. This typically means focusing the introduction of analytics on
one or two places in the sales process.
What is Your 2013 New Year’s “Go to Market Strategy?”
Most sales organizations have a small set of New Year’s objectives to guide them into
a Go to Market strategy. If, for example, one of these objectives states “focus on our
largest prospects” , you can look for analytical approaches that zoom in on this
handful of top prospects to better understand them, their product interest, and how
you can convert even more successfully. Analytics are often a way to take very
specific action on what can be generic objectives.
Why is it so Important?
You may have an area that has caused a major problem in the recent past or that has
been a nagging and well-known problem for a starting point.
You want to choose your starting point in those areas that are true levers for growth
or that support your chosen strategy to pursue growth. If the company’s focus is
mostly on cost, you might want to investigate your biggest cost pools such as the
total cost of your sales force, or the money spent on trade promotions and channel
programs or the money lost in poor sales qualification process.
Managing with Data… It’s Not Managing 3 Wishes!
The last thing you want to do is add to the sales
problem by forcing your sales people to engage in
number crunching and analysis about their territory,
their accounts, and their product sales. In addition it
puts an even greater, non-customer facing burden on
the sales persons workweek, it also doesn’t play to
their strengths. Most sales people do not have the
appetite or the temperament to spend significant amounts of time generating
analyses. However, they should have the capability and the willingness to act on the

3. results and outputs of analytics-whether that means understanding and accepting
that different prospects should be approached differently from others, or numerical
proof of a specific sales problem or objectives.
Selling with optimism is great, but it must be based on facts and insights. This is a
crucial skill for successful sales professionals and will become dramatically more
important over the next few decades as market complexities increase
and analytics as a competitive advantage comes to full maturity. Just don’t ask them
to chase those facts and insights themselves, which brings us to the importance of
using a support function to do this for them.
The Culture of Analytics
Many companies have strong organizational
cultures and sales organizations often have
their own subculture as well. This culture may
not be tuned in to the use of analytics and
may experience it as somewhat alien.
If that is the case, sales leadership should take
action to encourage the acceptance of
analytics and foster a fact-based culture.
Leadership can highlight and reinforce the
importance of analytics to include:
Asking for Facts-Sales leaders can achieve significant culture change by simply
asking for facts to back up assertions. If, in every key internal sales meeting or
account planning meeting, sales leadership asks for hard facts every time an
assertion is made, the broader sales organization will quickly understand that
leadership is serious about this and will seek out the right facts and insights in
preparation for the next meeting.
Rewarding Use of Analytics-By visibly rewarding, even promoting, sales
people who have a passion and a knack for seeking out and using analytics in
prospect and sales meetings, sales leadership will demonstrate to the broader
sales organization that analytics use is a capability important to their own
success.
While it is crucial to find the right starting point for analytics it is also very
important to start developing a future vision of sales analytics to communicate

4. and work toward. This will ensure that the analytics journey has direction and
is understood by the organization.
Your Analytics vision could include a number of areas, such as:
Product Bundling, Prospecting to Opportunity Analytics, Channel Optimization,
Talent Management, Predictive Selling, Customer Retention, Pricing/ Profitability/
Cost-to-Service Analytics, Sales Incentive Compensation, customer value, close rate,
pipeline process, Cross-Sell/ Up-Sell Analytics and Customer Retention.
Analytic Sensing is an even more strategic long term use of Big Data Trends
It could also include a vision for a decision-making framework on how to incorporate
analytical insights into the day-to-day running of the business. Furthermore, there
are different types of analytics such as “Market Sensing Analytics”. Most of the sales
analytical areas described involve some form of optimization based on current or
historical data and the killer of the Big Data Analytics… is “Bad Data from inconsistent
definitions and practices. Market sensing analytics are designed to monitor and
provide insights on business volatility by processing large amounts of unstructured or
non- traditional data and spotting patterns in the data. These patterns allow a
company to get a competitive edge by spotting market developments earlier than
other firms.
Big Data Analytics is the Key driver to the Science of Sales
By applying analytics to key areas across the sales process, an organization can
provide the objective data that can help sales
people make more informed, fact-based
decisions, use their time more effectively and
boost the overall contribution of the sales
organization. But the process for applying
analytics to sales can be daunting and filled with
missteps. Adhering to these principles when
bringing a scientific approach to selling will help assure that new analytical insights
result in meaningful performance gains, furthering the organizations movement
toward high performance.

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