The Cue

6 Tips on How to Improve Your Lowest-Selling Sales Reps' Performance

It’s 4:30 on any given Friday afternoon. The entire office is buzzing with weekend excitement, everyone sharing what they are going to be doing tomorrow. You are looking over your weekly representative reports, seeing who was at the top of their game this week. As usual, your top three salespeople are jockeying for the top spot: typical overachievers. You’ve got about 10 right in the middle, but you happily notice that their numbers have been rising steadily. But it’s the three at the bottom that take the smile from your face. Jason has come in last again: that’s his third straight week of not hitting anywhere near his numbers.

If this sounds familiar you’re not alone. Studies show that roughly 10% of your salesforce are the top, 70% are the middle performers- the ones who aren’t the best but they aren’t the worst either. These middle-of-the-road salespeople are the backbone of your organization. The other 20% are the bottom tier, the ones who always seem to struggle no matter what the sales manager does.

There is a way to improve the 90% of your sales organization that is struggling- a method that is not only proven but that you can do in a single afternoon that is guaranteed to boost your performance. The best way to improve the efficiency of your lowest-selling reps is to let data help you pinpoint the problem as well as the way to fix it. These 6 tips outline how you can use data to pinpoint your low-performers’ most urgent problems and fix them right away. Follow these steps with your under-achievers and we guarantee you’ll see an improvement that will help your bottom line.

Data Communication

First tip- communicate with data. Nothing is more frustrating to a salesperson than being called in to the sales managers office to get reamed for poor sales performance and then leaving that office with no actionable steps that they can take to improve. These meetings need to be more than just “you need to try harder.” Your sales managers need to print out a performance report with the following KPIs and methods and discuss them, one by one, with your low performing sales reps. Use data to communicate and you not only avoid miscommunications but you will also provide your low-performing reps with the insight they need to improve.

Activity Efficiency Ratios

Salesforce is tracking which activities were completed for every successful closed deal. To discover the activity efficiency ratio for your organization look at the past year of your successful closed deals and average out which activities were completed, how often and in which order, for each successful closed deal. This will tell you which activities are most efficient for your particular product.

Now, compare that data with what your low-performers are doing. Odds are you will discover that these underperformers are simply completing the wrong sorts of activities at the wrong stage of the sales process. But now, with data in hand about which activities are best for your organization, you can coach them to complete more efficient activities early on and they will have a higher chance of success. Keep tracking their performance with this new direction over the next week to make sure that the lesson has sunk in. For more on this KPI and exactly how to track it, check out our eBook.

Gamification

Sometimes the problem with a low-performer isn’t that they are completing the wrong sorts of a activities at the wrong time- it’s that they simply aren’t motivated. How can data help with a problem that is so deeply rooted in personality?

Simple: data can help you gamify your sales data in a way that will motivate your reps through natural, healthy competition. Thomas Steenburgh and Michael Ahearne of HBR call it “program-induced social pressure” and say “when designed well, programs heighten laggards’ sense of responsibility to the team and motivate stars to help laggards out.”  How can you design a social pressure program well? Do it with data. Place sales KPIs for process, activity efficiency and lead response time on TV screens throughout your sales floor for everyone to see. This will help your low-performers to know, at all times, where they are ranking according to their peers and will help them raise their performance to match their peers.

Lead Response Time

Leads that are contacted within 24 hours are 20% more likely to result in a sale, and the odds are even better if they are contacted within an hour. If your sales reps are not contacting leads within that time period then that could very well be the reason that they are lagging behind.

Gather data for how long it took the sales rep in question to contact the last 10 leads that they received. If they have not contacted them within at least 24 hours, ascertain why and make that a new goal for the underperformed to do. Incentivize them with perks wherein if they contact a lead within 24 hours they will earn recognition, but if they contact the leads within an hour they will receive something better. Consistency is key with this KPI, however. Track their performance for the next 10 leads they receive to gauge how well the lesson has sunk in. This is especially important as lead response time is one of the simplest ways to improve performance.

Process Coaching

Salesforce is currently tracking how long a representative’s opportunities are spending in each stage of your sales process. Often times lower performing sales reps will be effective at the early stages of prospecting and moving a lead through the sales process but will get hung up on one particular stage.

This is where data can help your sales managers pinpoint and solve the problem. First, you will need to filter your salesforce data by the # of opportunities, both won and lost, that an underperforming rep has been tasked with. Once you have that data in hand apply a second filter to discover which stages took the rep the longest. Finally, see which opportunities were won or lost based on how long they spent in each stage. With just a few simple data filters and layers of analysis you can discover exactly which stage of the process is hurting this rep’s performance and pinpoint your coaching to help in that particular stage.

Efficient Partnerships

If your low performing sales representative falls in the 70% of most sales teams, i.e. they are not underperforming but they are not performing particularly well either, the answer to bring them up to the next level might not be a matter of a 1:1 coaching meeting or gamification, but simply seeing and observing the behavioral habits of one of your top performers. To do this, you should pair the underperformed with one of your top performers for a few days- at least 3 days for optimal training.

The best way to make these partnerships is to use data to discover which step in the sales process your underperformed is struggling the most with. Then, compare that data with your top performers to discover a foil- a top performer that is particularly strong where the underperformed is particularly weak. This way your partnership will be tailored to meet the needs of the person that needs training, coaching them through exposure and experience to the correct way to do things.

The simplest way to monitor these KPIs and implement these methods is with a solid sales performance platform that can make activity efficiency ratios pop, gamify data, notify you when your lead response time is slow, make the slow steps in the process easily identifiable and help you make efficient partnerships. VisualCue’s sales performance platform accomplishes all of these objectives and more. Try it out with a free version today!

by Andrei Carvalho

What is Data Visualization and How Can it Improve a Sales Organization?

What is Data Visualization?

Data visualization is a lot like architecture: it is a blend of creativity and science that has amazing practical benefits. At it’s most basic layer data visualization is an abstraction layer. As Scott Berinato of HBR writes, “Decision making increasingly relies on data, which comes just as with such overwhelming velocity, and in such volume, that we can’t comprehend it without some layer of abstraction, such as a visual one.”

Berinato’s definition gives us exactly what data visualization is and why it is valuable to a sales organization: it is a layer of abstraction, i.e. it translates the hard data into a different, visual form, and in so doing it makes data which comes at high velocity and volume easier to understand.

In a modern sales organization this means that when data is coming at a high volume (lots of data), velocity (real-time, streaming data constantly being generated) and variety (data coming in both structured and unstructured formats from many different sources) there is no better way to quickly consume and act on that data than visualization.

How Can it Improve a Sales Organization?

Makes Patterns Visible

This benefit of data visualization is particularly beneficial to those sales organizations whose data is coming from more than one source. In the modern marketplace many sales teams are working under these conditions- you could have sales and customer data streaming in from Salesforce reports, with marketing data coming in from Grow or Hubspot, with performance data coming in from a motivation app like Ambition or Hoopla.

Trying to find the correlations between these different data sets can be a next to impossible task without the aid of data visualization. For example, Berinato recalls the managers of the Osprey aircraft at Boeing needed to improve the efficiency of takeoffs and landings. But there were so many sensors recording so much data that “without visualization, detecting the inefficiencies hidden in the patterns and anomalies of that data would be an impossible slog.”

While the Boeing corporation used data visualization to spot patterns between different sensors sales and marketing teams can use the same principle with their different sources. The crew at visual.ly, for example, combine data from different sources into a single visualization and see a 72% increase in traffic. You can use data visualization to see how a dip in marketing affects sales or customer service by combining these disparate data sources into a single sales performance platform or an add-on to Salesforce, allowing you to see every metric and KPI visually presented in a single tool. For more on which KPIs you should be visualizing for the most benefit to your bottom line, see our free eBook.

Reduces miscommunication

If you believe Dale Carnegie 90% of management errors come as a result of miscommunication. The reasons for that miscommunication can be various, but the solution to many of them is simple: have all of your teams working off of the same data visualization and analytics tool. This way you can make sure that your teams are working from the same source of information and, if your data visualization layer is intuitive enough, that they will have the same interpretation of that data.

But data visualization increases communication among your team in another way: coaching. According to Berinato, ”Visual communication is a must-have skill for all managers, because more and more often, it’s the only way to make sense of what they do.” It can sometimes be difficult for a sales manager to talk to a sales rep about exactly where they are going wrong. But with data visualizations that are intuitive and easily understandable your sales managers can make their coaching more efficient.

This communication benefit works the other way in an organization as well. Executives want to know high-level information from the sales floor, and they often get that information in the form of Salesforce reports. The problem is that these reports are time consuming for the sales managers to produce and confusing for Executives to read. They can tell both parties that there is a problem, but do very little to discover the reasons why. When you bring data visualization into this equation your sales managers can communicate more clearly and accurately while the Executive can more easily look at a visualization than a complicated spreadsheet to try and find the best ways to improve.

What to look for in your data visualization?

While data visualization is always a good idea, there is a right and a wrong way to go about doing it. For example, if your data visualization only contains charts and graphs then you are missing out on many of the benefits of visualization. Research has shown that “attributes such as color and the inclusion of human-recognizable objects enhance memorability.” Therefore, in your data visualization solution you should look for creative uses of color and human-recognizable objects like pictures and symbols in order to enhance intuition and memorability among all your staff members.

Additionally, researchers J. Suda and Hampton-Smith undertook an extensive analysis of modern data visualization tools and used the following words in their description of the top 5 features that an effective data visualization should have. We put in our own examples to help you understand these features more fully.

1.Responsive

• A responsive data visualization is easy to navigate no matter what platform you are on. You should be able to explore the data visualization as easily as you would a picture or painting- zooming in on certain aspects while also stepping back to see the big picture. How well the data communicates no matter what level you are looking at is a determination of its responsiveness.

2. Real time

• One of the main benefits of an abstraction layer, as Berinato pointed out, was the ability to decipher information as fast as it appears. No one, other than the very highly trained, can do so with just a spreadsheet. It is therefore important, to get the most out of your visualization tool, that the data coming into it be as close to real time as possible.

3. Customizable

• This is especially true when it comes to performance thresholds. The best visualizations will take a data point and automatically determine whether that data falls into a certain range called a performance threshold. If the data point falls within prescribed parameters then the visualization will reflect that in color or size. If the data point falls outside of that parameter the visualization should also automatically reflect that by a change in color or size. This way your staff’s attention will be automatically directed to those metrics that need their immediate attention.

4. Fast

• Fast data visualizations occur when the data can go into a visualization tool and the response is immediate and accurate. Visualizations that take even a minute to load lose their real-time efficacy. This is easier said than done- a fast tool is a powerful one that can combine data sources, analyze the data for performance thresholds and translate all of that information into a visual medium in the blink of an eye.

5. Interactive

• Your staff should be able to not only look at the data that is being presented but they should be able to interact with it to explore the deeper relationships behind those data sets. Too often visualizations only present the outer layer without empowering users to delve deeper into that visualization and play with the data

Use these five rules as a guide for your data visualizations and you will be seeing data in a whole new light that will positively impact your bottom line through pattern recognition, clear communication, and real-time analysis. Or, try a free version of a data visualization tool like VisualCue and see the benefits for yourself.

by Andrei Carvalho

You got the data now what? 5 simple ways to interpret your sales metrics and turn it into profit

The Problem: How do I start using data to improve?

There is no more denying it- we live in a world dominated by data. A recent GE survey showed that “61% of senior innovation executives now use big data to inform decision-making –that’s up from 53% in 2014.” This demonstrates that the most successful businesses out there are using big data to make their decisions, and their numbers have only been growing since 2014. If you’d like to join them then you’d better do the same.

But how exactly do you begin doing this? Where do you start? It’s one thing to say “you’d better start using data” and another to actually give the reader something valuable to do with that admonition.

That’s what we’re here to do. What follows is a step by step guide to analyzing the data coming in from your sales teams. We will tell you which KPIs you should be looking at and then give you suggestions about real actions you can take to start improving your bottom line with that information. We’ve pulled the following information from our own years of experience in the sales data analysis field as well as real stories from business leaders like you.

1. Start gathering your data

Luckily, this is the easiest thing in the world to do nowadays. Frankly, any digital CRM tool is already collecting mountains and mountains of data for you. This post is more concerned with providing you actionable insights on what to do with that information, but it’s good practice to give all readers the right starting point- and that means collecting the data first.

But what if you don’t have a digital CRM, are you out of luck? The short answer is yes. Investing in a CRM is an absolute must for the modern business. We’d recommend starting with the most prevalent CRMs out there- Salesforce, Hubspot, Oracle, and SAP.

2. Get the big picture with the following KPIs

In a previous post, we talked about the 5 KPIs you must be tracking. We didn’t just blindfold ourselves and pick those KPIs at random, we chose them because they were the single best KPIs to give you a big picture.

Why start off with the big picture when this whole blog was supposed to be about giving you actionable insights? Because if you don’t understand what is wrong with your big picture then you won’t make the right kinds of actions to improve. It’s like turning on the light before you find the thing you are looking for.

So look at these KPIs to get the best idea of where your sales engine is misfiring.

• Lead Response Time
  • No matter what your industry is, look for a lead response time of under 24 hours. If you are over 24 hours then you need to revise your processes ASAP to start reaching out to leads within that time. If you can capitalize on every lead that comes through then you will undoubtedly see positive movement in your bottom line.
• Efficiency Ratings
  • Here you are looking at which activities lead to the most won deals down the pipeline. What you need to do here is connect won deals to daily activities. The actionable item is obvious- do more of those activities that win you deals, and fewer activities that don’t. This will greatly improve your daily efficiency and make the entire organization more profitable.
• Sales Cycle
  • This is the biggest of the big picture, you are going to look at your entire sales process and determine how long it is, on average, from when a deal enters your pipeline to when it is either won or lost. The actionable item is less obvious- don’t go making sweeping changes to your sales process before you look at all the facts. Bigger deals take longer to close than smaller ones, and your industry might have a longer sales cycle.
• Successful Steps
  • This is a bit of a deeper dive- you are going to take the data related to how long each of your deals spent in certain steps of your pipeline and average that time out. Doing so you will discover which stage in your pipeline is holding up the works. Once you discover that your way forward to action is clear- you don’t need to overhaul the entire sales process, just take it one step at a time. This way you waste less time and resources.
• Representative Outliers
  • Here you are looking at the big picture of your sales teams. Which teams are succeeding and which are failing? Your actionable item here is simple: once you identify your top performers you use them as trainers for the rest of the crew. You will undoubtedly see more sales as a result.

3. Dive deeper with the following metrics

Okay, if you are looking at those KPIs you already have a number of data points and actionable items for them, but that’s not enough. There are more actions you can take by interpreting the data you are getting from your CRM.

It comes in the form of looking for the following items in each of the following metrics. These are smaller items, but by taking action within each of these sales metrics you can improve your day to day operations and start seeing immediate positive impact on your bottom line.

• Specific Action Activities
  • This metric tracks what actions each of your representatives are completing on a daily basis. Most modern CRMs track this information, and you can take action on it in a really simple way. By this point you should have already discovered who your top performers are- simply look at the action activities they are completing every day and make that standard practice throughout your organization. It’s essentially a micr0-efficiency rating for each employee that can only positively impact your bottom line.
• Lead Flow
  • Much like efficiency ratings and specific action activities focus your sales team on the performance of their activities, this metric focuses your marketing department. Marketing will be sending you data (likely from Hubspot or other CRM) about how many leads they are generating, and where they came from. With that information in hand the actionable intelligence is clear: make sure that your marketing team is focusing on the most fruitful avenues for lead generation and abandons less successful campaigns- saving you money.
• # of Qualified Opportunities Created
  • However, simply telling marketing to focus on avenues that give the most leads is a bit too simple, and the situation is more complicated than that. What you really need to do is get sales and marketing together to talk about what makes a qualified lead. For example, a few qualified leads are better than a dozen unqualified leads- have your marketing department focus on what gives you qualified leads.

4. How to take action

Quite frankly, the action needs to begin with the VP or C-level. While many of these metrics, KPIs and actionable items can be taken by sales managers or VPs if the executive suite does not buy in to the project then any action taken is doomed to be minimal and transient.

Panorama Consulting writes “Without executive support, it can be very difficult to procure the employee resources that are needed to make a project successful. Only by having true buy-in to the project will executives understand the importance of ensuring the right people are available to make the project successful.”

So how do you take action on the data that is coming in? Read steps 1-3 above and make sure that the initiative is starting from the VP or C-level executives. We’ve already given you the specific action steps you need to take to start turning your sales metrics into profits, but the VP or C-level is the key to making sure that the actions get taken.

5. Keep up the good work

Too often in our experience data analysis and interpretation are completed passionately for a week or two and then, as soon as things get difficult, the initiatives go by the wayside.

What you need to do in order to really turn your data into profits is stick with any data initiatives you begin. This step is closely related to step 4. When a data initiative comes from the VP or C-level and has a longer range view than just expecting returns in the short term then it has a significantly higher chance of success.

What we are talking about here is nothing less than changing your organization’s culture to focus on using data more effectively. But what is an actionable step you can do to actually make sure that these initiatives will stay active within your culture?

• Gamify your data. Now that you know the metrics and KPIs, share them out with your teams to inspire healthy competition.
• Communicate your changes. Data works best when everyone knows it and has it to work with. Put your data in a public place in your office in an understandable format so everyone knows the day to day changes.

by Andrei Carvalho

7 Efficient Ways to Scale a Sales Organization Leveraging Data

When it comes to scaling your sales organization there is definitely a right and a wrong way to do things. The right way means scaling your sales organization efficiently, encouraging growth or scaling back in the right areas at the right time. The wrong way is the exact opposite- it means simply hiring more representatives or managers because that is what other people have been doing. It happens whenever you scale with the hope, instead of the knowledge, that you are making the smart decision.

How can you know you are making the best decisions to scale your sales organization? Leverage data in the following ways to make sure you are scaling your sales in the right way. According to Peaksales, “Leaders need to test assumptions, basing sizing decisions on data rather than instincts.”

1. More than 29 Opportunities per Rep

According to Openview this is around the maximum number of open opportunities that a sales rep usually can handle. Take a look at your open opportunities by representative metric and if the majority of your representatives are handling more than 29 open opportunities then it’s time to bring on some more help.

2. Under 40% sales sourcing

Here, sales coverage means the # of qualified new leads that come from your sales department. According to Sales Benchmark Index,  “Even if you are supported by a world class marketing team, the reality is that sales will still need to source at least 50% to 70%.” Take a look at where your leads are coming from and if the sales team isn’t coming up with anything then it’s likely not the time to expand. For an easy way to fix this metric, see step #7.

3. Lead response time over 24 hours

According to Harvard Business Review “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.” Also, according to InsideSales, “Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first.” Take a look at your average lead response time and if you aren’t reaching out to prospects fast then it’s time to hire.

4. Fewer than 25% Leads are Qualified

Scaling sales often means scaling marketing as well, and keeping the two in sync is important. For example, Gleanster research shows “Only 25% of leads are legitimate and should advance to sales, while 50% of that qualified number aren’t yet ready to buy.” If you discover that your leads are coming in fast but they aren’t qualified then it’s not time to expand. Only expand when your percentage of qualified leads grows over 25%.

5. Less than 75% Opportunities Nurtured

Nurturing, in this case, means that your opportunities are progressing through the pipeline in a timely manner with frequent touches. According to a Demandgen report, “Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.” Further, the Annuitas Group shows that “Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.” Analyze the data around your sales cycles, looking specifically at how quickly your representatives are going through each stage of the process to make sure that no opportunities are sitting stale.

6. Less than 80% social media touches

Everyone knows that most sales happens over the phone, though cold-calling is on its way out. According to a report by the Brevet Group, 78% of salespeople using social media outsell their peers. If you find that most of your new leads are coming from social media sources and your representatives arent’ connecting with their clients on social media then it’s time to look at your process, not expand it.

7. More than 25% new leads come from referrals

According to Dale Carnegie, 91% of clients say they would give a referral, yet only 11% have been asked. If your sales teams aren’t utilizing this often under-utilized resource then you are definitely not ready to scale your sales organization yet. However, when around a quarter of your new leads are coming from referrals then you know that your team is ready to take on some new challenges.

If you can analyze and examine each of these seven KPIs and sales benchmarks effectively, looking at them all as a whole rather than just one or two then you can rest easy knowing you’ve made the smarter sales scaling decision.

by Andrei Carvalho