Categories: Sales Leadership | Sales Productivity
In today's competitive market, leveraging data effectively can be the key to unlocking higher sales performance and increased revenue. Most leaders understand they must harness the power of data to drive success. But in order to effectively use data, you must first ensure you have the right structures in place to collect data about your sales activities and apply findings in a way that's relevant and actionable.
Parm Uppal, Chief Revenue Officer of Benchling who has previously led and helped to scale companies like Data Robot and Luminary Cloud, recently joined the Revenue Builders Podcast for a discussion with John Kaplan and John McMahon. He shared his approach to implementing data to drive results as a sales leader. Today, we'll break down his insights as well as some best practices we've learned from working with leaders who successfully scaled their companies to $1B+ valuation.
Continue reading to learn how these revenue leaders leverage data to enhance sales performance and drive stronger, more reliable revenue.
Collect More Deal-Specific Data
Data is consistently used for decision-making and performance measurement, but is often overlooked when it comes to "soft" operations like skills and opportunity coaching. Elite revenue leaders extract more deal data at the CRM level - conversations, qualification benchmarks, critical buyer roles and value drivers - to gain a higher level of visibility into how the strategy is executed at the customer level. This data can then be leveraged to enable sales managers to be better coaches and enhance consistency across the go-to-market motion.
While collecting more data is almost always a strategic advantage, it does require buy-in from your customer-facing teams as they're often the ones inputting this data. Forms and fields can often feel like a chore, and data collection initiatives are too often implemented without considering relevance and messaging to internal teams. Leaders should take initiative to ensure reps and managers understand how documentation will help them be more successful in their role.
Supply chain technology unicorn project44 faced this challenge when implementing new deal processes, but they focused on demonstrating the positive outcomes for each role. Here's how one leader described their adoption process: “At some point, it crosses the top of the mountain and starts rolling downhill. The reps look at each other and say, ‘Hey, if I pay attention to this process and do what I'm being asked to do, I'll close bigger deals, and I'll close 'em faster.’" As a result of leveraging new data collection and deal coaching tools, project44 was able to reduce their average sales cycle length by 19%.
Leverage Data in Coaching
Deal-specific data can be leveraged to identify gaps in skill and process consistency across your go-to-market motion. It's important to not only assess why reps fail, but also why they succeed. Elite leaders leverage data to identify the key behaviors that produce success in their go-to-market organization, then establish a success profile that can improve consistency across hiring, onboarding and training. Managers can then compare each rep's data against this success profile, giving them insight to address specific skills or knowledge and create a coaching plan tailored to a rep who may be struggling.
Managers can also use deal data to have a greater impact with opportunity coaching. By creating more robust reporting standards around deals, leaders give managers greater visibility into where a deal stands in any given moment - leading indicators for deal health, critical buyer parties and priorities that need to be identified and untapped potential within each opportunity. Leaders should establish clear qualification benchmarks throughout the lifetime of the deal and ensure that data collection practices align with those metrics, equipping managers with the skills and information they need to help reps maximize every opportunity.
With great data also comes great responsibility - it's important to ensure that your teams don't get bogged down in data and understand what's most critical to their daily activities. Parm Uppal emphasizes the importance of equipping managers to distill data into actionable items for reps. "When a sales rep wakes up in the morning, there's three things that really go through their head," he says. "Have I got enough pipeline? Am I busy enough in the deals that I'm running? And what am I closing?" By simplifying the data to these core areas, leaders can provide clear and actionable insights. Consider implementing a dashboard that tracks key deal activities in the CRM to help sales reps stay focused and understand their performance at a glance.
Building a Data-Driven Sales Culture
Creating a culture that values data-driven decision-making is essential to building a resilient and scalable revenue organization. Elite leaders cultivate this mindset by emphasizing collaboration between executive leadership, RevOps and enablement teams to ensure that data is used effectively across the organization.
Parm Uppal warns against simply building a culture of data-backed assumptions. "I have a methodology where I go facts, deeper facts and conclusions," he says. "You'll end up in a situation, if you don't go facts, deeper facts, conclusion, where you're gonna go with the facts at surface level and you're gonna spend a lot of time debating."
To avoid these hangups in the collaboration and decision-making between leadership, RevOps and enablement, leaders can apply a version of First Principles Thinking. For example - in the context of assessing rep productivity and effectiveness, it's important to start from the data rather than an assumption. Start by looking at the activity of every rep: how many meetings, business value assessments and active opportunities have they opened over a given period? Next, assess the activity within these meetings to find your deeper facts: what value language was used? Were critical business problems and outcomes identified? What collateral and proof points were leveraged? How did these affect conversion ratio from their activity? (This is where gathering deal-level data in the CRM becomes crucial). From here, you can draw conclusions about skill gaps, training needs and inconsistencies with your sales process at the organizational level.
Embed data-driven collaboration into your organizational DNA by establishing a Management Operating Rhythm (MOR) that defines when and how teams analyze data, the cadence on which they collaborate cross-functionally and the specific data points that are most critical to your revenue strategy.
Scale Your Revenue Engine
The most successful company leaders leverage data to create a repeatable sales process that enhances their scalability. We analyzed the actions of leaders at the top 1% of sales organizations to bring you the strategies that produce tangible outcomes. Learn how to create predictable revenue, enhance business visibility and build a revenue engine that attracts more investment. It's all in our ebook, Increasing Company Valuation.
