Driving Sales Performance With Post-sales Analytics
September 02, 2008
By Christopher Cabrera
In this age of widespread business visibility, it's ironic that sales performance, a primary success driver for any enterprise, remains a dangerous blind spot for most companies. This is particularly alarming given today’s macro-economic conditions and super-heated competitive environment, where anything that can maximize the value of your sales spend should be eagerly embraced. But fear not, there is a way to eliminate that blind spot and increase your organization’s sales performance by gathering and analyzing the valuable data created as a result of each sales transaction. The starting point? Knowing where to look.
The value of data is well recognized by sales. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications have revolutionized selling by helping organize pre-sales data—contacts, opportunities, etc.—that reps and management need to manage the sales pipeline. But what about post-sales data? There is an enormous amount of potentially useful data produced at the time of sale that is generally orphaned information about who bought what from whom, where, at what price, with what discount and at what commission level. When collected and analyzed, this data can be leveraged for insights into selling patterns, individual and team effectiveness and product performance. It can be used to gain visibility into commission spend and sales plan effectiveness. And it can be combined with pre-sales CRM data and other business data for the fullest possible picture of what is going on in the field to drive strategic sales behaviors in real time.
From siloed systems to clunky enterprise applications, there have unfortunately been many barriers to implementing post-sales analytics in the past. But today it is becoming increasingly easier and economical. Here are some fundamental best practices to bear in mind when mining for sales data gold:
1. Automate your incentive sales compensation process. Your post-sales data is scattered across a variety of disconnected systems—including HR, pricing, product and order entry/ERP. What this data has in common, however, is that it all figures into determining sales compensation. Hence the sales compensation management process itself is the de facto enabler to gathering this data for analysis. If you are still managing sales compensation manually via spreadsheets, this isn’t so easy—and doing it in a timely, cost-effective manner is impossible. But if you automate the compensation process, then you (as a matter of course) automate the timely and economical collection, cleansing and aggregation of this data—turning it into arguably your most reliable, richest data asset. Gartner estimates that fewer than 10% of sales organizations today with more than 100 people receiving variable compensation have deployed a prepackaged sales ICM application.
2. Combine pre- and post-sales data to drive desired behaviors in real time. Among the more revolutionary ways of leveraging aggregated post-sales data is to use it to drive desired sales behaviors in real time. In this example, the post-sales data is accessed by sales reps from within their CRM application, such as Salesforce, Oracle or Microsoft. There it can be combined automatically with pre-sales data, such as live CRM opportunity data, for real-time analytics that help guide reps in most profitably structuring their deals for maximum commission and bonus payout—which, by extension, leads to more strategic sales behaviors and more profits for the business.
Conversely, pulling CRM data into the post-sales data mart enables enhanced sales pipeline analysis by management, as well as improved sales forecasting and planning. Users may also want to integrate expense management data with post-sales and pre-sales data for a full, accurate and immediate picture of total cost of sales.
3. Drive sales and financial performance with analytics. Automating sales compensation management gives you a powerful post-sales data mart, cleansed by the rules of compensation. You can then analyze this data with an eye towards enhancing your business strategies, changing sales rep behaviors and super-charging the sales organization. Users of the data can include top management, sales management, sales operations, finance and even reps themselves.
Executive dashboards can be built on top of this data, so that any functional role can see exactly what it needs to see and determine what to expect based on a combination of historical and fresh data. Users can track key performance indicators more regularly to drive efficient sales behavior and gain visibility into sales spend with a single, authoritative view and quantifiable data. For example, you can track the performance of your best contributors and understand what’s really driving their success. You can accurately see how much you paid in incentive compensation and why you paid it. You can easily pick out the highest margin deals, or those that have been heavily discounted, to better reward the right behavior in the field. And you can leverage metrics—such as commission spend as a percent of revenue—in order to spot potentially costly issues early on.
4. Leverage today's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model. On-demand applications remove much of the costs and hassles of deployment and maintenance so you can more easily capitalize on their benefits. An on-demand sales compensation management solution literally hosts your post-sales data securely in "the cloud," where the data can be leveraged by numerous other applications, from analytics and CRM to a host of emerging applications including territory management, quota management and pricing management. In reducing IT involvement and delivering faster technology enhancements, SaaS not only makes good economic sense, but it makes getting the data and application functionality you want a much easier, more flexible proposition.
Achieving Sales Performance Enlightenment
Post-sales analytics can help you avoid "flying blind" when attempting to optimize sales performance. There is a wealth of information that can be mined for insights into your sales-related functions. Providing the means to tap into rich post-sales data has never been high on the to-do list of traditional on-premise enterprise analytics vendors, nor for many enterprise IT organizations, for that matter. But now—and just in time—collecting and leveraging this data is easier than ever, by an order of magnitude. Don't leave your sales performance to chance in these challenging times. Let post-sales analytics open your eyes to find sales performance enlightenment.
Christopher Cabrera is president and CEO of Xactly Corporation
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
This article is brought to you by Sales & Marketing Management, the leading authority for executives in the sales and marketing field.
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