Baby Step Your Way to a Data Driven Sales Machine

Sales Operations owns a variety of responsibilities at every company, from quota forecasting to training and hiring. They’re often put in the tough position of driving decisions for the entire sales organization with incomplete data and a poor idea of what activity is actually happening in a given lead or opportunity’s lifecycle. While a manager may want to know the optimal amount of phone calls, demos, or emails to accelerate the deal cycle; a typical sales ops team is still stuck on “how many phone calls, demos, and emails are actually happened?” and “how do we start getting call recordings tracked into Salesforce?” With the promise of machine learning and AI fast approaching, it is natural to want to jump to insights and outcomes, but without a solid foundation in place, these key basic questions cannot even be answered.

So… how do you get started?

Step 1 — Get every phone call into Salesforce… automatically.

Incomplete data is useless. Without trust in your CRM data, it is impossible to produce helpful, insightful reports and dashboards for your team. Take the human variable out of tracking sales activities by investing in software that automatically logs every touch to Salesforce.

Start with the phone call. Why? Because 92% of all customer interactions happen over the phone. Find a solution that captures every call across any device that someone could use, including desk phones, mobile phones, and computer calling. Think of how much easier reporting and dashboarding would be if every phone call was logged in the exact same way and contained all the information you need!

P.S. — Consider an automated solution for tracking emails and meetings while you’re on this step, it will come in handy later.

Step 2 — Figure out what your sales team is doing.

Before going through an implementation, I’ll frequently ask customers “What is the average number of calls each SDR or AE on your team makes in a normal week?” Nine times out of ten the answer is “I don’t know.” Before you can effectively call coach or figure out what actions convert leads into opportunities, you’ve got to have a baseline idea of how much activity the average rep generates.

Start by building basic dashboards like “Number of Calls Per Rep this Week” and “Talk Time per Rep this Week”. You might find out your team isn’t making or taking nearly enough phone calls; critical activity considering the conversion rate on phone calls is 30–50% (for comparison, web leads convert at just 2%).

Step 3 — Figure out what your sales team is saying.

Once you know how much time your reps are spending on the phone, it’s time to start determining if your team is using that time wisely and saying the right things to convert leads. Leverage call dispositions to build out a “Talk Time by Call Outcome” report. This should give you a pretty good idea of how much time someone spends leaving voicemails vs talking with decision makers. If someone spends 10% of their day calling bad phone numbers, you might have a lead data problem you didn’t know about before!

Start (compliantly) recording phone calls and listening to a random sample to determine if the messaging is correct. Nothing is more harmful to your sales team than a rep that doesn’t know what they are selling or how to sell it.

Step 4 — Make every rep your best rep through coaching.

Good News! Steps 1 through 3 have finally prepared you to start coaching your team to success. Once you have an idea of how many phone calls your team should be making and what you want them saying on those calls, you can drive the right behavior.

Leverage activity measurement, real time call shadowing, recordings, and conversation analytics technology to create a measurable and repeatable sales process that will decrease your new hire ramp time and increase the effectiveness of your existing team. You can even go a step further and bring in coaching software that automatically transcribes calls and performs keyword analysis to identify the best (and worst) phone calls.

Step 5 — Tie it all back to your funnel.

Consider this final step the holy grail of sales insights. In order to make this work, you need near perfect data and a crazy consistent process across your entire team. Remember when I asked you to invest in automated email and meeting tracking back at step 1? This is where any untracked emails and meetings will come back to haunt you.

At this point you should be able to report on every activity in a lead or opportunity’s lifecycle from cold to close. Using this data you’ll be able to do things like determine (approximately) how many emails, meetings, and phone calls drive leads and opportunities through each stage of the sales cycle. You can make accurate quota projections and hire based on how much time it will take to generate all the activity needed to close a deal. You have the ability to flag leads and opportunities that haven’t had enough touches so managers and reps know they’re falling behind before 11:59PM on the last day of the quarter. With good data, you’ll be able to provide your team with all the knowledge they need to succeed.

The exciting truth is that with products like Truly consolidating the sales tech stack and integrating seamlessly with Salesforce, Step 5 is now within reach for many businesses.

Request a demo to learn how you could be optimizing your funnel and achieving these results in the next few months, not years!