Ten Ways To Add Data To Your Sales Process
Or Ten Ways That Data Sells
A week doesn’t go by where I do not find myself sitting across from a potential client who is saying the following three things:
- We are struggling with sales growth.
- I think our data can help us.
- I am not sure how.
The final statement is music to any analyst’s ears. It is what we do. I have written on how many times. Today will not be one of them…
How is actually a step too far for this article. Often it is a step too far for my clients as well. The thing they first need to learn is what. How can follow right after. So this article will focus on what. Specifically:
What you can do with data to enhance or empower your sales efforts?
The following ten ideas are not exhaustive, but they aren’t far off. Most additional items will feel like subtle adjustments. They are intended to educate you on the possibilities so you can later focus on just how to build and use them.
#1 Authority Slides
Numbers add authority to most decks and presentations. This certainly includes your sales slides, pitch decks, one pagers, whitepapers, or any other persuasive materials. The right numbers will help you connect and close. Determining which KPI to add, what the right visuals may be, or exactly how to create these slides may require some help. What should you pay? I can’t say — but I can offer how to calculate it (or at least one way).
At a minimum, consider the commission expense you generate in a typical quarter. Do not fool yourself by excluding the work of partners or others who might forgo commission for equity or salary. Now divide by 25. That level of investment should easily pay itself back in short order.
#2 Compelling Statistics
Suppose your sales process is mass market or you are struggling to even open the door in certain scenarios. Compelling statistics can help. Everyone knows that a great “elevator” or tag line can open a lot of doors, well a compelling statistic can double down on that effect. This is both a call to create KPI and the need to identify that “magic” number that truly creates authority, provide perspective, and compels.
Valuing this work is a bit harder than the last. A great statistic is has incredible leverage and most companies will have considerable opportunities to use it. Divining the true value isn’t really worth the exercise, consider this stuff table stakes or required. What is easier to determine is the time & cost. It takes no more than a single day for a small company, up to two weeks for the largest. Pay accordingly.
#3 Reinforcing Impact or Value
Your metrics & statistics are fairly straightforward. Your clients metrics are a little harder. Determining the value created for a client is probably the most valuable KPI you can calculate — but it is not as simple as above. Determining the impact or value your product or service provides may require testing, a formal case study, or other additional efforts.
How much should you invest in determining these numbers? That is difficult to say. What is easier to determine is whether this path is likely to create significant advantage. To determine that, you must first understand your market. It is unlikely that a mass market approach would create enough leverage to justify this sort of investment. However, B2B or channel partner models may make this far more profitable. Secondly, you must understand how unique your product is. The more unique, the more valuable this determination can be. If competition is easy to find, customers will simply consider you against them.
#4 The Value of CLVs
Customer Lifetime Value is sometimes more an art than a science. It is often more a rough guess than a scientific projection. Either way, it should be the pillar of a great sales process. Too often, sales efforts are misaligned to prospects with the highest close rate rather than the highest lifetime value. Even when profitability and value are built in, they often exclude future value or project it wildly.
CLV and NPV (Net Present Values) are two of the harder analytic challenges facing any business (especially a young and/or evolving one). I can offer very little in terms of benchmark here. It is greatly dependent on the complexity of your product, market, and customer. What I can say is — start with a plan and embrace #5.
#5 Smart Incentives
Prior to knowing your true CLV, you can at least align your sales incentives to help you. The first stage of a CLV is a simple back-of-the-envelope planning exercise. Note — simple <> easy. This plan needs to be thorough and have solid perspective, but do the right steps and the plan materializes nicely.
The plan done right, will highlight data, touch points, and process need to predict and assure high value. You want to use this to augment your sales process. Sadly, many is the company that pays commissions blindly. Not every signed deal is a win — no matter what Salesforce tells you. A win without data may help pay the bills, but it won’t grow your business. (I can prove that, empirically)
Pricing this is easy. Lower your base commissions. Somewhere on the order of 10–30%. Assign small payouts to important data, touches, and process points. I will leave it to you to determine whether this is a net-sum-zero change or a potential increase in total payout. Let me offer — consider also paying for losses… data on losses is also valuable and too many sales teams drop the ball here.
#6 Competitive Intelligence
One of the few analytic processes that is often best done outside of analytics is competitive intelligence. Many a marketer or bus dev professional is nimble and formidable in this space. While science can’t hurt — it, along with discipline, tend to be marginal players. It is also cheaper to keep the PhD’s and other quants off this budget item.
BUT — you must share the findings! You shouldn’t need to interrogate the marketing, sales, or bus dev team to get a CI readout! Or beg… or even ask.
#7 Estimating Bids
Many companies sell through a bidding process. Young and growing companies often do this at their own peril. At the CEO confessional, this issue is omnipresent. We lost the deal because we overpriced. We lost a lot of money because we under-priced. The pendulum swings both ways.
Not every CFO is an analyst, or at least not one experienced in generating project-based proforma P&Ls for businesses (or business units) without scale, experience, and comparables. That sort of financial analytics is a specialization. Acquire an expert fractionally — this is a project or advisory to enhance your existing team. Benchmark cost to the size of a lost deal and/or a deal that is a loss.
#8 Selling Through The P&L
On a similar theme — your finance team knows your business. I hope. They very well may not know your customers business. I spent a long time in financial services, ask our finance team to build a retail P&L was like asking them to start speaking Latin. So you may not have considered using your client’s P&L to sell, but it can be very effective for service-based businesses.
Again — benchmark against a typical deal size. Hire fractionally.
#9 Innovative Pricing Models
Even if you are not in a bid-based selling environment, even if you don’t have a service — the two exercises above can lend value in a more indirect fashion. As a rule — anything deemed “indirect” needs to be done more cheaply — at least until it proves otherwise.
Supply and demand is a great way to do pricing, but if you become an expert on your P&L and your clients — you may be able to innovate. This is why more and more products are becoming services these days. I know — we keep hearing the opposite, but think razor blades, packaged meals, and Uber.
Innovative models consider feedback loops, time as an investment, and aligning pain points. Do you want to charge for the coffee or the cup and number of pumps/shots? Innovate at both your own risk and reward!
#10 Business Intelligence As A Value Prop
Finally, if data is important to selling your product, you really needed to consider business intelligence as a standard value prop (don’t call it a feature). Tracking the results, performance, and value of your product or service is a value to you and a your customers.
Be sure to think through the other nine items when you design your business intelligence solution. Many client’s only ask for sales numbers or units, but cost, value, and impact are NOT optional. These same clients will call you back at the end of the contract to demand justification for re-signing. Don’t play catch-up. It is much harder. Get in front.
How do you price this item? Unfortunately, that greatly depends on all the items above. While many incompetent analysts (an even more executives) believe anyone can build a report — the reality is almost entirely the opposite. A good report, a valuable report is an elegant synthesis of your business, your KPI, your decisions, and your data. I am not saying you need perfection. I am just saying it is a complex space. Best-in-class business intelligence is ALWAYS an ROI positive investment. Otherwise… it is not best-in-class.
Summary
This article is a good 50% longer than our typical offerings. I could call it a test, but honestly the extra three minutes of reading content felt justified. But it wasn’t a how, that would have required pages, if not volumes. Hopefully you learned a lot about what. Hopefully, you gained perspective. And hopefully you’ll consider giving us a call to help with the how. Regardless — thanks for reading!
