When thinking about how to best support sales staff, businesses may want to to leverage the massive amounts of data they generate every day. Sales analytics is an important tool to ensure sales teams meet their targets and monitor outcomes when reaching out to prospective customers. However, companies may want to change how they view the purpose of sales analytics and avoid common pitfalls to be at their most successful.
An infographic by project management software provider Viewpoint shows data and analytics solutions have increased the pipeline growth for 75 percent of companies. These firms are seeing three times more sales cycle conversation rates as they utilize sales performance metrics that help them fine tune their sales activities to boost their rates of success.
The biggest mistake made with sales analytics
There are some pitfalls companies should look out for when integrating data-driven solutions in the workplace.
One of the biggest mistakes companies can make is using analytics to solve problems that currently exist rather than focusing on the benefits of analyzing data for future. While companies could simply use sales analytics for decision-making, more successful companies utilize this software to change behaviors that could increase the value of the company in the long run, Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, wrote in Harvard Business Review.
Harvard Business Review notes that companies face the challenge of using analytics to develop new behaviors rather than only using them for problem-solving and decision-making.
“Most people in our organization do better with history lessons than with math lessons,” one consumer product analytics executive told Schrage. “It’s easier for people to understand how new information and metrics should change how they do things than getting them to understand the underlying algorithms … We’ve learned the hard way that ‘over-the-wall’ data and analytics isn’t the way for our internal customers to get value from our work.”
The most effective sales analytics helps companies improve their overall performance by pairing data with incentive. But it’s not enough to set benchmarks and hope sales staff will reach them. Companies need to be sure the sales team are motivated by rewards like compensation and incentive packages. Versatile sales compensation management solutions should encourage workers to not only meet the company’s benchmarks, but also establish their own goals.
It may be easy to install software for incentive compensation management in the workplace to improve sales performance, but it’s how companies use it that matters.
