What Sales Analytic Capabilities do you Need to be Effective?

We’ve been busy addressing an issue that has vexed sales people and management for almost as long as people have sold items to other people.  To succeed in sales, there are a number of questions that switched on sales professionals ask on a daily basis:

• Am I going to reach the target for this period (month / quarter / year)?
• Are my to-date sales on track? What is their trend and projection look like?
• Do I have enough opportunities that have a high enough probability remaining to close in the period?
• Am I at risk due to some large deals associated with a single customer, partner or sales rep?
• Are we building backlog because we have some products that we can’t ship?
• What is the average sales discount and what is driving that?
• Are we closing deals with sufficient gross margin?
• What is the overall average sales cycle?  How much time are deals staying in each stage?
• Are deals moving through the various sales cycle stages or are they getting delayed in one or more stages?
• Are there any anomalies relating to expected seasonality and past history in sales cycles or forecast projections?
• Is my win/loss ratio on track and trending the right way?  What deals have I lost?  Is there a pattern (a particular partner, sales rep, product line, competitor etc.)?
• Are the conversion ratios and cost per lead/opportunity/sale all looking OK?

Of course these are just the questions related to this period.  Good sales reps and management are also looking forward and want to understand their future pipeline as well:

• How big is my pipeline?  What is my pipeline coverage as a ratio of my target?
• How has the pipeline changed over time?  What is driving those changes (which deals, sales reps, partners, customers etc had the largest impact on the movement)?
• What stages are the deals in the pipeline?  Are they all clustered in early stages or is there good deal load in each stage?
• Are the deals in the pipeline moving through the stages as expected?
• Is the pipeline too dependant on a small number of deals, customers, sales reps, products, or partners?

Most CRM systems will allow you to run queries and reports to try to get the data to answer these questions.  BUT it is very time consuming, cumbersome and then often you have to review multiple reports in combination, file away and retrieve snapshots for historical reference, and then export data and do lots of manipulation in spreadsheets.  Who has time for that when sales people are totally busy trying to close the period and achieve their target?

There is a much better way and look for some exciting news on this topic next week!