The Cue

How to Leverage Data to Scale your Sales Team in 2017

March 22, 2017How To

The Problem: How to Scale the Right Way

Most businesses, especially those with a heavy sales focus, face a lot of pressure to scale their operations in order to meet with increased demand. It makes perfect sense when you think about it: if the business were going well then VPs and C-Levels are going to start looking for smart, responsible ways to grow their sales force in order to not only keep up but stay one step ahead of the competition. This is usually where the most fear or trepidation for the VPs comes in, and with good reason.

Steve W. Martin put the fear into the following terms in the Harvard Business Review– “What prevents a sales organization from achieving success?  After studying hundreds of sales organizations, I have found the answer to this question is directly related to the challenges associated with their development stage.” That’s where the fear really comes in- most organizations don’t go about scaling their sales organization in the right way, and as a result, they don’t achieve success and the entire business is in danger of failing.

So what is the solution to scaling a sales organization in the right way? While there is no magic cure-all for knowing the exact right way to scale your sales team, there is a lot to be said for making smarter decisions during the crucial stages Martin was talking about. And smarter decisions start with being more informed- in other words, knowing how to use data and information to make informed, smarter decisions rather than just going off of your gut.  We’re going to talk about what metrics and KPIs you should be looking at in order to make the right decision about when and how you should be scaling your organization and in which direction.

Smarter Decisions Start with Knowing the Difference Between Metrics and KPI’s

It’s lesson one because the difference between them could mean success or failure when it comes to making a data-informed decision. According to Jonathan Taylor of Klipfolio a KPI is “a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.” A metric, on the other hand, is “a quantifiable measure that is used to track and assess the status of a specific process.”

But what is really the difference between a KPI and a metric in plain English? Taylor notes that “With metrics, think broad. With key performance indicators, think deep. For example, a metric may monitor website traffic compared to a traffic goal, whereas a key performance indicator would monitor that same site traffic but only insofar as it’s related to, say, content downloads.” In other words, metrics are the building blocks of KPIs. KPIs can be an aggregation of a number of metrics, though most usually they are a selection of a very few, related metrics. In Taylor’s example, the correlation of metrics to form a KPI is # of hits on a certain website and the # of content downloads. A KPI in such a scenario might be “x amount of web traffic converted to content downloads.”

So what does knowing the difference between a metric and a KPI have to do with using data to scale your sales organization in the right way? Becuase it is only through looking at the right KPIs that you can know when and how to scale your sales organization. If you choose to expand or cull your sales organization without knowing whether or not you are hitting certain benchmarks then you run the risk of making a serious error that could have been avoided if you had only looked at the data.

The key here is to look at a certain number of metrics and KPI’s and then, once those numbers pass over a certain threshold you can know with surety that it’s the right time to expand or cull your sales organization.

So Which Metrics and KPIs Will Tell Me When and How to Scale my Organization?

That’s just the thing- if you are reading this you know your business better than we do. When to scale a business is a tricky question and varies by industry, so we won’t try to tell you exactly when you should be increasing or decreasing your sales force. Therefore it is up to you to set the performance thresholds, but we can say with certainty that no matter what business you’re in you need to at least be tracking the following specific metrics and KPIs that shed the greatest insight on growth before you make a decision whether or not to expand or decrease your sales organization.

Metrics

• Deals Closed
  • This is one of the most basic metrics and is still useful even without context. This is the most basic because it essentially shows you how your sales are growing or shrinking and therefore acts as a great early warning system for possibly bigger problems ahead. However, don’t put too much faith in this metric alone. You might be closing fewer deals but each of those has a higher dollar value attached, or the converse might be true.
• Size of Open Opportunities
  • This metric is great for understanding what kind of business your sales organization is attracting. Again, this metric serves as a wonderful early warning system for either potential benefits or negative impacts based on the size of deal your representatives are attracting. But without the context, this metric can be misunderstood. For example just looking at the size of your open opportunities could have you neglecting the historical context and future predictions of the same data.
• Cost to Acquire Customer
  • This metric asks you to closely monitor how well your sales and marketing teams are working together and is one of the first metrics that will start to slip if the two departments start drifting out of alignment. If you see a sudden spike in the cost to acquire a customer that could mean that your marketing team is spinning their wheels bringing in poor leads for your sales department and you need to start bringing the two of them together. For more information on how to do this, check out our article on the subject. You can always find this metric in your Salesforce data, as explained here.

KPI’s

• Sales Per Representative
  • This KPI combines sales metrics with individual representative performance. If you are keeping your eye on this KPI then you will not only know who your top sellers are but can see, if you compare the data historically, whether or not your training programs are working and whether or not you are growing or shrinking as an entire workforce. As an added benefit, according to Klipfolio, “Some leaders share this information across their entire sales teams to encourage competition among reps.”
• Product Performance
  • This KPI not only looks at metrics for # of products sold but then breaks down and compares that information to other products in your organization. The benefits of such a KPI are beyond obvious- if you know which of your products is selling well you can focus more of your business on those aspects while perhaps adjusting your approach to the rest of them. This KPI is also helpful in scaling your organization because it points a direct light on what you should be training your new salespeople on.
• Pipeline by State/Region
  • When trying to decide how and when to scale your sales organization nothing is perhaps more important than understanding your business as a whole. If you, like many companies in the world today, have business in more than one state or region then you need to be looking at the bigger picture. By breaking down your sales data into a geographic location (the first metric) and then the size of opportunities in the pipeline for those regions (the second metric) you will have a clear picture of whether or not your entire organization is booming or just a single region has gotten hot. This allows the conscientious VP or C-Level to focus their attention in the right area.

How Do You Use This Information?

Now that you are tracking these 6 metrics and KPIs that shed particular light on how well your organization is growing, and how to expand it in the right way, you need to understand how all of the pieces fit together. The secret to this is that you can’t just look at any one KPI or metric, you need to be examining all of them at the same time to spot patterns and see how they all fit together. When all of these metrics and KPIs are working together, with none of them lagging behind or lacking attention, then you know you can make a smart decision with confidence.

The difficulty doesn’t lie in gathering the information. Countless programs like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Insightly are collecting real-time and historical data on daily sales, website traffic, and broader sales goals. The difficulty, rather, is in gathering all of these data sources into one, centralized location and then seeing all of that information in the big picture without losing the details.

That’s where a sales performance platform like VisualCue comes into play. VisualCue allows you to see all of the metrics and KPIs listed above, and more, in a single, understandable graphic that makes the actionable intelligence jump off the page. The platform even comes with customizable thresholds so you can know the instant that a metric or KPI starts to slip into worrying territory.

Seeing all of these KPIs in one graphic helps you understand the data in context, enabling you to spot patterns and make sure that you know when the time to scale is right without having to spend hours poring over spreadsheets and reports. According to analyticbridge , “Data visualization enables users to effectively see patterns and relations that occur between operations and business performance. It’s easier to see how your day-to-day tasks impact your overall business performance, and find out which operational change triggered the growth/dip in business performance.” That is exactly what data visualization is supposed to d0- enable anyone to find the patterns in how one of these metrics and KPIs affects the others. That way you can make sure that your entire business is on the right path before you have to make the large, strategic decision to scale. It’s not just about growing your business, it’s about growing it in the right way.

by Andrei Carvalho

5 Simple Strategies to Integrate Your Sales and Marketing Teams in 2017

March 17, 2017How To

It’s a problem as old as companies themselves, but 2017 brings fresh challenges and solutions to the age-old problem.

The Problem: The Roles of Sales and Marketing is Changing

Aligning sales and marketing has always been a difficult proposition. Molly Soat of the American Marketing Association defines the problem most succinctly when she writes “For most companies, marketing’s job is to generate leads, and sales’ job is to turn those leads into clients. In practice, though, marketing and sales need to work in tandem, aligning their roles and goals to ensure that ROI becomes the responsibility of the whole organization, not individual teams.” And therein lies the difficulty- getting sales and marketing to work together has always been difficult because the two departments have, historically, seen themselves as being in separate departments with separate goals. While in a perfect world they would work in tandem as an ROI achieving machine the reality is much more complicated, and has only gotten more so in 2017 and an already difficult proposition has become more challenging.

How have the roles of sales and marketing changed in 2017? According to sales and marketing expert Craig Rosenberg “The top third of the sales cycle has gone away. Salespeople believe that the beginning of the traditional sales process has evaporated and that buyers are self-servicing their needs instead of engaging with salespeople.” This viewpoint is backed up by the sales and marketing leaders at Marketo. According to their most recent research, marketing is now responsible for the  buyer’s journey all the way through evaluation, with sales only stepping in for the final stages of evaluation and purchasing. This essentially shifts the responsibility for educating a potential buyer to marketing, a role that traditionally had been held by sales.

Aligning sales and marketing is still important, as seen when Forbes writes “71% of C-level executives noting that sales productivity is ‘critical’ to future growth.”  The sales masterminds at SMA write “There is a whole lot of evidence that closer Sales+Marketing Collaboration lifts Sales Productivity, and I can show you that a lift of just 5% in Sales Productivity can yield a 20% increase in profit. So, Sales+Marketing Collaboration should be a BIG DEAL” (ibid). But if the situation has gotten more complicated as buyer’s preferences and behaviors shift in the digital marketplace of 2017 then the C-level also needs new tools and strategies to accomplish their goals.

That is what we offer in this post- this is an overview of how to align sales and marketing, giving the C-level reader a step-by-step guide to getting started the right way and ensuring that their sales and marketing teams stay aligned in the future.

The C-Suite Provides the Vision

According to Fergal Glynn and the American Marketing Association “In a lot of places, there’s huge tension between sales and marketing teams. In sales, they don’t appreciate all the different work that marketing can do, and marketing doesn’t understand all of the different situations that the sales team faces. The very first step is an executive agreement.”

That is why the first step begins with you, the executive. Part of providing leadership for your organization comes in the form of just getting these departments together for the conversation to begin in the first place. And, once that meeting is being held, the executive needs to be a strong, clear voice for defining the different roles of marketing and sales within the organization. Now, as for what those rules should be we recommend research into your own customers. In this case, marketing handles the buyer’s journey through evaluation with sales taking the lead through those crucial last steps of evaluation and purchase.

Define your target

The next step in aligning sales and marketing to define the target audience, with the end goal of getting sales and marketing to agree on who they are even talking to in the first place. This is a crucial step because all further actions depend on a clear understanding of the audience for your industry, then sales and marketing can finally begin to collaborate effectively.

Why do both departments need to be involved in coming up with this “ideal buyer?” According to Craig Rosenberg “Sales and marketing must agree on who the target buyer is, what they do every day, what they care about, and why they buy. This effort should not be owned by only marketing or only sales. Instead, this should be a joint activity.” This is essentially echoing what Molly Soat identified as the key to aligning sales and marketing in the first place- ideally throughout these meetings they will transition from working in a silo to working in tandem.

Invest in Sales Performance Software

The modern take on the old standard of sales performance management are software platforms with a strong focus on data analysis that put valuable information on every opportunity, lead and account within easy reach of both sales and marketing.

While there are many different sales performance software options out there (many of them start with the CRM itself) there are a couple of guidelines on what to look for when you are thinking about purchasing a platform for your organization.

• It should be scalable.
• Data collection and automated analysis should be key.
• The visualization or presentation layer should be understandable and accessible.
• There should be one for both sale and marketing.

Of all of these criteria perhaps the most important is the last. If sales and marketing are working from a single source of truth then there will be fewer miscommunications and you can foster a corporate culture where the two operate as a single unit instead of separate entities.

This step is truly important, and with good reason. According to the Savo Group, “55% of top-performing companies are investing in sales performance technology and programs to drive sales productivity.” 

Perfectly Align Your Content

If the statistics are correct and marketing really is responsible for both attracting and educating prospective buyers then there is only one way for any organization to do it effectively: content marketing. Everyone in marketing has heard the now old adage “content is king,” but the true power behind the throne happens when sales and marketing come up with a content strategy together.

So how does this happen? Simple- have sales and marketing talk about the hot-button issues in the industry and then, together, come up with blogs, videos and other content that will educate prospective buyers in the right way so that when they finally do speak to a salesperson at the very end of the funnel they are ready and willing to take that final step into purchasing.

The marketing gurus at Hubspot recommend as much when they write”Your sales reps are talking with prospects all the time and know what is getting them excited about your company.” They should then be able to share this information with your marketing team so that the message the marketers are delivering and the promises the salespeople are making at the end of the process perfectly align.

Decide on Lead Generation Metrics Together

Now that you know who you are talking to, what content they are interested in and have a sales performance platform gathering the data on how everything is performing you can really put that data to good use; lead generation metrics. Traditionally this is where sales and marketing have tended to butt heads most frequently. Marketing works hard for every lead that they get and when they pass them on to sales they are proud and happy about them. When it turns out that sales doesn’t think the leads are as great or they are not what they are looking for then miscommunication and inefficient operations are a result. The minds at Marketo define this quite well when they write  “The problem is that, traditionally, Marketing defined the qualities of an MQL [Marketing Qualified Lead], and Sales decided what made someone an SAL [Sales Accepted Lead] or SQL [Sales Qualified Lead]. This partially explains why Sales sometimes feels that Marketing hands off unqualified leads – Marketing doesn’t always know what Sales is looking for!”

So how do you fix the problem? Easy- consult the data in your sales performance platform or CRM to discover which leads the marketing department generated went all the way down the pipeline faster and led to more revenue than any other lead. This way you can not only direct marketing to the most fruitful best practices but sales can know that every lead coming down the pipeline is qualified according to what works best for your particular organization. Essentially it is using the data your company is already producing in a new and more efficient way.

Aligning sales and marketing has always been a challenge to the CEO or COO because these different areas of the business have been seen as fundamentally different. As a result they have traditionally worked in silos, missing out on communication and often working against each other rather than as a cohesive whole. However, if you follow these steps you can start seeing the amazing results that happen when the two work in tandem.

If you would like to learn more about aligning your Sales and Marketing teams, download our free E-book “The War is Over: The ultimate guide to aligning sales and marketing”.

by Andrei Carvalho