You have made big investments in CRM, marketing automation, business analytics, and reporting. Maybe you have even jumped into the world of machine learning. But beware, your sales data may be creating a pyramid scheme. Let me explain…
At the top of your pyramid is your CRM system where your sales team is entering data and managing your sales process. Your marketing and sales ops teams are dependent on your CRM data to do their jobs: create bottom of funnel accurate forecasts, establish overall pipeline visibility, and leverage performance data to drive high performance demand generation campaigns. If you believe your CRM data is not accurate, your teams are using data from your sales and marketing tools that are biased, inaccurate, and/or false.
Once the data is labeled as flawed, invariably sales, marketing, operations and finance begin to develop work arounds or work ‘outside the system’ instead of attacking the root cause of this data inaccuracy.
What are you to do?
1. Identify the root-cause: do a deep analysis of key ‘must win’ opportunities in your current forecast to identify questionable, missing or data gaps in your CRM system. Go beyond gut feel and opinion to establish those attributes and metrics that will improve your probability to ‘close/win’ an opportunity.
2. Force rank, prioritize, and train: analyze your historical ‘closed/won’ opportunities over the last 4 to 8 quarters to establish those data elements attributed to winning. Engage sales management to validate and endorse the minimum data entry that will be required from sales at each stage of the sales process. Provide your sales teams with continuous training and reinforcement to ensure they understand the importance and WIIFM in leveraging the sales process and CRM platform to achieve maximum success. This is not a technology problem. It is a continuous people, process and change management exercise to achieve optimal results.
3. Establish accountability: rinse and repeat: Hold every team member accountable by establishing defined metrics, reports and dashboards. Review and measure results continuously. Establish consistent lead-to-opportunity ‘closed/won’ visibility across sales and marketing to ensure data integrity is top of mind in driving sales performance and predictability.
These 3 steps will ensure you don’t get sucked into a ‘sales data pyramid scheme.’ Hopefully, this is logical and straight forward. There is however one big challenge to success. Most companies lack resources (mostly people) and time (those resources have a day job). To implement the above requires people who have data assessment knowledge and experience to quickly convert data insights into actions. It’s a lot like the Farmers Insurance commercial, your resources must “Know a thing or two because they have seen a thing or two.”
There are resources out there (like yours truly) who have a vast amount of experience. Over the past 5+ years, Quick Start Strategies has assessed and worked with hundreds of companies to improve forecast accuracy and drive sustained revenue performance. We are committed to delivering solutions that will improve your overall sales performance, predictability and insights.
These 3 steps will ensure you don’t get sucked into a ‘sales data pyramid scheme.’ Hopefully, this is logical and straight forward. There is however one big challenge to success. Most companies lack resources (mostly people) and time (those resources have a day job). To implement the above requires people who have data assessment knowledge and experience to quickly convert data insights into actions. It’s a lot like the Farmers Insurance commercial, your resources must “Know a thing or two because they have seen a thing or two.”
There are resources out there (like yours truly) who have a vast amount of experience. Over the past 5+ years, Quick Start Strategies has assessed and worked with hundreds of companies to improve forecast accuracy and drive sustained revenue performance. We are committed to delivering solutions that will improve your overall sales performance, predictability and insights.
