Over the course of our careers, we’ve had the privilege of working with dozens of sales managers. In many ways, managers hold the key to the success of their sales reps. They know each and every rep well, understand the customer and prospect mix each rep has, the market that reps are operating in, the relative difficulty of making the quota, etc. They capture and impart this knowledge during their one-on-one discussions with reps.

Such tribal knowledge is often not institutionalized throughout the sales organization. The result is lack of repeatability, consistency and scalability of results – which means they are starting over with each new rep, team and division that they move into management.

Certainly factors like compensation, incentives, coaching and product training play a role in this success too. But we see distinct traits in the sales managers that are attracted to work with us – they use numbers, statistics, data and models to get the best performance from their sales teams. Here are a few traits that we’ve seen, some challenges that they’ve faced and why they’ve chosen to work with us:

TRAIT: They desire to “do something different this time.”

As ideas like call blocks, teaming and Hawaii trips get suggested, they realize these are maybe one-off, not trackable or simply not proven to bring enough of the performance they need.

CHALLENGE: They are looking for a scalable solution they can point to every rep and say “do this, it works, did you do this?”

REASON: Predictive analytics provides that scalable, stable and tangible call to action that every rep can do. By using lead generation solutions liked scored, quality leads, managers can ensure increased sales productivity for every rep.

TRAIT: They play with large spreadsheets – a lot.

These managers often have downloaded the entire customer data from Salesforce, pivoted it, summarized it and they’ve looked for patterns to share with the reps.

CHALLENGE: They know they are on to something, but this is on top of everything they have to do. And although they have great Excel skills, they are running out of time … or memory on their laptops!

REASON: Predictive analytics gives them all the information they need on their fingertips. Instead of trying to do the mathematics and analysis themselves, they can now see the patterns forming and be left to do what they do best: manage and coach the reps.

TRAIT: They constantly seek new data.

Sales managers with a quantitative leaning know that data they have may not be enough to make the sales cycle quicker and certain.

CHALLENGE: They are buying leads from various sources, appending demographic data, mixing in product usage data and contact summaries to create a broader picture. They tend to look at social media data too. With so many sources to keep track of, analysis of their sources and quality control can become quite problematic.

REASON: Predictive analytics can give them the broader, larger picture, compiling the data, trends and statistics from all sources.

TRAIT: They focus on “the middle 60%.”

They leave their top 20% of sales reps alone, and they know who their bottom 20% are, but they want to improve results for everyone else. They look to analytical methods for improvement.

CHALLENGE: They know there is a cyclical effect that helps the entire organization, and these middle 60% are the difference between making the numbers this month vs. making numbers consistently. They believe in incremental change. The sales managers we work with want to improve x% of the reps, get x% more customers this month, increase average order by x% and penetrate x% more categories. They want consistent gains across many dimensions that are both scalable and sustainable.

REASON: Using predictive analytics tools to score leads, to gauge customer timing and to stay on top of buyer cycles can reduce variability and give the middle tier reps a big productivity boost, thus creating consistency across all reps, almost like making “the rest like the best.”

Incidentally many of these sales managers are also in growing companies, and they’re hungry for even faster growth. They act as a buffer between understanding the math and delivering a simple message to the reps.

Most of all, they are very inquisitive and inherently believe that an analytical approach does work. They have to believe this, in order to give us even 10 minutes of their precious selling time. That makes all the difference.

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