Data-Driven Sales Coaching: The Moneyball way

Moving from an intuition-driven approach to a data-driven approach of coaching. Coming closer to the truth with Data.

Measuring consistent and predictable performance in Sports is a key problem everyone seeks to solve. As Peter Brands says, there is an epidemic failure within Baseball to understand what is really happening. And this leads to people who run Major league Baseball teams misjudging their players and mismanaging their teams.

SaberMetrics was a key approach used by the baseball team to solve this problem. To explain in simple terms, it is the use of an Individual player's past performance and readjusting with other players to predict the relative team performance.

For example, evaluating a player's past performance enables an analytic overview. Comparing this data between players can help one understand critical points such as their market values. In that way, the role and the salary that should be given to that player can be defined.

While we don't take inspiration from Moneyball, we see this as an excellent analogy to what we are doing.

Intrinsically we are driven by a PLG Strategy and we have a high-velocity sales model. On any day, Sales reps receive hundreds of leads to prospect, qualify, solve their problems and negotiate. However, as we moved through each month there was significant variance in the customer we were converting.

The structured onboarding process ensured that the Sales rep had a deep product understanding; it did not assure that this alone would be sufficient to convert a customer. We understood the need to ask more questions and diagnose the issues in the process. As such, we were trying to answer the following questions;

1. Can we make our conversions more predictable by measuring the efficiency of the Sales rep. and helping them play the right game?
2. How to identify the bottlenecks in the Sales Funnel and take an approach to problem-solving as an organization?
3. What's the best way to structure the weekly discussion with the Sales rep. to understand the bottleneck for each individual and solve that bottleneck?

We experimented by analyzing new metrics and focusing on existing reports/ metrics. Here is how we approached solving our problem.

Our Approach to Solve the Problem

Tools and Processes

A. Sales Scorecard for each ISM — In a high-velocity environment where hundreds of leads get assigned to a Sales rep, it isn't easy to analyze every conversation. This is the reason we build an ISM Score Card for each Sales Rep. The Report is automated in Metabase (Our BI Tool) and linked to activities performed by ISM in Hubspot (Our CRM). Through this report, we try to focus on the following aspects:

1. Speed of our reach-out/ Response — Are we reaching out to the users as quickly as possible? What is the percentile reach out for each individual specific to this metric?
2. Exceptions — These reports highlight exceptions such as where a rep has not made any calls or no touchpoint in the last four days or more, etc. This makes sure that we don't miss out on following up with active prospects at the right time.
3. Connect Established — This allows us to see the no. of prospects where the rep has been able to initiate a conversation with and deep dive into how each of those accounts is moving through the funnel.

The ISM exception reports make it easy for the individuals and the management to understand any process gaps. Referring only to CRM makes the whole process very difficult. The exception reports optimize the effort for both the individual and the management to understand and close gaps quickly.

B. Analyzing the Funnel at each step

While the exceptions helped us close the process gaps, we wanted to also understand what's happening to all the leads and not only the ones where we are initiating a conversation. Therefore, we decided to analyze the funnel at each step. This is how we measure all this currently:

We now look at absolute numbers and percentages at each stage for each individual. This would essentially help us understand the bottlenecks. For example: If an individual is able to connect to more individuals, this might mean a better ability to open more conversation by being more activity-driven. However, if the same individual is a qualified deal to conversion ratio might be less. This will mean that he/she could be coached on how to navigate the conversation in a better way.

This gives a better view of what's happening each week for every sales rep. We measure it weekly and monthly because speed matters in what we do.

C. A Dedicated Sales Excellence team focused on Analytics — Setting up a dedicated team has been a game-changer for us at Hevo. Many companies wait till the Sales process matures and start investing in these aspects. However, we wanted to focus on the correct elements from the beginning. When you want your sales rep to work at high velocity, the analytics also need to be high velocity.

D. Buy-in from all the Stakeholders — Since we look at Sales more from a problem-solving approach, it is important to make everyone internally understand what we are doing. It was important to articulate why we have such high granularity reports and what impact they can drive.

It would be impossible to get everyone on board, and Salespeople do come with biases of working in a traditional Sales Model. Still, we've been lucky enough to have a team of great salespeople understanding and working with a data-driven approach.

We are still far from perfect. We still understand the impact of each stage of the funnel, what metrics to measure, definitions of each metric, etc. But we believe that a consistent focus on diagnosing the problems with data and building a system to decode that data will help us control where we are going. Taking a leaf out of Peter Brand's comments, we want to be driven by data because we don't want to misjudge and mismanage the sales team. We want to empower them with the right coaching.