For any airplane pilot, the auto-pilot is a valuable companion. It can automate routine tasks such as maintaining altitude and direction so you are free to focus on the next tasks needed to reach your goal destination.
Airplane auto-pilots can handle many tasks for the pilot. They can:
Follow programmed climb and descent rates to pre-set altitudes
Turn the plane to a specific direction
Line up for landing on the runway
Execute missed runway approach procedures, like climb away from the ground if the runway approach lights are not visible
But amazing as auto-pilots are, aviators are aware that the auto-pilot does not fly the plane for you. You are still always responsible for reaching the goal destination.
Business analytic tools – particularly those with predictive methods – can function a lot like an auto-pilot. They reduce workload, prioritize tasks and standardize best practices so you can focus on things the auto-pilot doesn’t do: continuously improving human performance, anticipating hazards far in advance, and staying ahead of the navigation tasks.
Like auto-pilots, how can analytics contribute to sales enablement and productivity?
REDUCE WORKLOAD:
Pilots joke that flying is a long span of boredom followed by moments of panic. Perhaps like all the sales activity during the final days of the quarter? In flying, reducing mundane workload is a top concern and this makes a big difference in the most crucial aspects of flight such as preparing for landing. Sales teams could offload mundane workload to auto-pilots as well.
Here are some ways analytics can reduce workload so you can perform where it counts:
Less time searching. Time spent searching is hard to document, but costly nonetheless. Smart Selling Tools suggests that only 218 days a year are “selling days” – that’s slightly more than six calendar months.
Align customer-brand preference. Manufacturers and brands run promotions based on their needs – clearing inventory, launchingnew products or gaining competitive share. These initiatives are often brought to the attention of sales reps in an ad-hoc informal way. But by using analytics to identify customer brand and product preference, price sensitivity and other customer attributes, reps can take advantage of promotions opportunities and contact targeted customers who are most likely to respond.
PRIORITIZE TASKS:
We all prioritize tasks, either by design or default. In the high-stakes world of aviation, prioritization brings a whole new level of professionalism, airmanship and eventually, delivery of consistently successful outcomes. Because successful outcomes must be achieved. Doesn’t that sound like a sales wish list?
Here’s how prioritization via predictive analytics can help your sales teams:
Prioritize based on predicted value. Sales reps must allocate time to customer conversation, learning, research and administrative work. Beyond applying good time management techniques, advanced analytics can further boost sales productivity. For example, there is significant value to developing a predicted value measure of customer interaction.
For example, predicted value could be the sum total of expected new orders, new product categories, and average order size of repeat orders. Based on this, the frequency and type of contact with the customer, level of effort/time, and type of offers could be varied to realize the value. Without this approach, sales reps are likely to focus on the trailing twelve month revenue which is a lagging rather than a leading indicator.
Suggest a “best course” workflow. It is not realistic to expect reps to know preferences across all customers and circumstances. But there are metrics that create a chain of sales activity – like a decision tree – that if optimally followed will result in a significantly higher customer value. How can reps achieve this?
Determining ideal “horizontal contact strategy” – in marketing parlance – is perfectly suited for predictive analytics. Rather than stop at one or two actions, this allows reps to see the relationship as a nurturing continuum. This workflow can then integrate with campaign management approaches so reps get additional support from marketing.
STANDARDIZE BEST PRACTICES:
No pilot will fly without a checklist. A checklist is neatly categorized with specific, sequential tasks to be done in a short amount of time, or a related set of maneuvers to do. For example, checklists include tasks for pre-flight, taxi, take-off, climbing and landing. The task instructions for each section are also specific to each type of aircraft, and they include manufacturer recommendations, learnings from experienced pilots, and recommendations from NTSB investigations – in other words, time-tested best practices.
Do checklists have a place in sales? Yes. You can use them to:
Test and Learn. Like marketing will test customer contact points — such as catalog page layouts and e-commerce offers – establish sales rep dimensions to test. These can be customer portfolio mix, product penetration, growth and customer loyalty. Test various combinations for sets of reps and determine the most profitable combination for customer, product and sales rep. These combinations become a checklist to follow.
Build analytics that recognize rep attributes. Some reps get growth from a small set of customers, others do well in certain product categories, others do well with a certain size book of business. Through predictive analytics, you can avoid painting reps with a single broad brush that may be counterproductive, and instead craft individual performance levels that are driven by how similar reps have performed historically.
To be effective, sales teams can benefit from centralized formation, the ability to derive insights, and the fortitude to simplify actions. This provides a sense of urgency that can best be leveraged through both predictive analytics, and the integration of these solutions into the daily stream of the rep’s work.
Just as safety is paramount in aviation in all aspects of flight, efficiency is critical to sales. Analytics can deliver that efficiency as a true companion in all aspects of selling.
Inside sales teams are at it every day, making thousands of calls to prospects, seeking an appointment or a sale. They are given scrubbed lists with contact names, job title, phone numbers and a good luck pat. On the back end, managers track calls, appointments and sales. The cycle continues when reps deplete their assigned leads and it starts over again.
There are times when this well-oiled prospecting machine can under-deliver – and you may not be aware. But there are easy fixes. Here we explore three cases, and discuss how to overcome these challenges.
TESTING NEW MARKETS: When looking at sales data, you may find strong traction among companies that don’t fit the best customer profile — or at least what the rep thinks is the best profile. This finding is usually uncovered by in-depth profiling, micro-segmentation or modeling analysis. These customers may not be among the largest customers, but you find that they purchased numerous units of products that fit specific needs.
As an example, say you are selling technology products, and religious institutions are not known as leading technology buyers. But recently we came across a church buying hundreds of iPads for one of its programs. This is opportunistic entry into a market if other religious institutions have similar programs. What you can do:
To aid sales calls, share historical product purchase data with reps so they lead with iPads and related iPad cross-sell products instead of laptops, printers or software.
Show reps the sales potential of these calls when they may understandably question this. Pull examples to show similar sales to this market and the value of the deals.
To help target this new vertical, it is important to match the highest product propensity to the leads in this vertical.
MISSING INFORMATION: Even when providing a scored list through predictive modeling, some information valued by sales reps for their calls may be missing.
In one case, sales reps for a technology provider perceived the presence of a website as a surrogate for computer purchases. In our B2B database of 14 million businesses, this field is only available for 22-25% of sales prospect records. In our scored file this info was available for 35% of records – certainly an improvement, but reps were concerned about the two-thirds of leads without this info. The scoring rated these leads as strong prospects but reps were uncertain about calling them. What do you do?
Have them do a quick Google search on company name and state. The company may have reviews, social media presence, etc. that would otherwise confirm they’re “tech-savvy,” and if there’s a website it will likely turn up.
Show cases where leads without this information have progressed through the pipeline and converted successfully.
Explain that the process of data collection, while well-defined, is not always perfect. Set up specific steps they can follow to cross-corroborate other fields and deduce the missing information.
PROSPECTS HEAVILY SKEWED: Recommendations from predictive modeling may favor market segments that reps do not normally associate with large sales. But the model shows easy smaller sales opportunities exist.
One of our projects produced recommendations where the prospect company size varied from 100 employees to as low as 8. Most records were towards the lower end, reflecting the business universe and perhaps implying employee size was not an important predictor of sales. These leads were produced by the scoring algorithm and further fine-tuned as most likely to respond. However, reps were suspicious of the potential of prospects with fewer employees. When reps are not completely trusting the sales potential:
Provide them with evidence that shows why these prospects scored high. Share the desirable attributes of these prospects.
As one option, using Industry (SIC) distribution, create “blocks” of leads that contain a mix of company sizes and provide guidance that x% are expected to convert for each of these “blocks.”
A benefit of predictive analytics is the ability to score based on a large number of attributes (500+ variables is not uncommon for our models), reaching beyond the boundaries of even human intuition which no doubt can bring profitable insight. We don’t discount that intuition; rather, predictive analytics should lead you to new sales from new markets. The flip side is that these new markets and new customers may not intuitively look like great sales opportunities at first glance, precisely because they’re new and different.
But acting on model recommendations is needed to break through to faster growth and higher sales. This is where sales managers can mentor reps to see the opportunities ahead. Help sales reps trust the idea of calling upon these new opportunities, and the potential conversion rates and quota attainment, even when reps may have previously rejected some of these opportunities. To get the true gains possible with predictive analytics, you need to build the trust and confidence to push beyond a business-as-usual routine.
If yours is like most sales organizations, there is at least one program or motivational initiative with a fun theme to it, possibly involving sports or other games. A desire for recognition and winning brings out something extra in us, and what better place than sales to showcase that, where there’s motivation to scale new heights against the competition and to personally and professionally benefit.
According to gamification.org – a terrific collection of resources – gamification is “the process of adding Game Mechanics and Rewards in non-game contexts to boost Engagement, Loyalty and Fun!” If that doesn’t seem intuitive, you’ll recognize it from first-hand experience because a popular application of gamification is frequent flyer programs. Gamification is simply a methodical approach to engage your audience, create a two-way give-and-take, and connect with people’s motivations and aspirations.
In a business context, engagement through games can be targeted towards customers, sales reps, partners and even employees. Let’s break gamification strategy down to its core components:
Game mechanics are the building blocks of the process. Gamification.org says these “are constructs of Rules and Feedback Loops intended to produce enjoyable Gameplay that can be applied and combined in any context.” According to gamification.org, there are 24 distinct blocks to assemble. Here we will focus on a few most important for sales enablement and productivity.
In sales as in life, you have two kinds of people:
Those who are self-motivated (intrinsic).
Those who need an outside factor to motivate them (extrinsic).
To appeal to these types, from the 24 items described by gamification.org, we have created logical groupings called intrinsic (what matters to the individual) and extrinsic (about an aspect of the game or community) to organize the building blocks of game mechanics. We’re not claiming to have the final word on these groupings, but rather invite your input on them.
Intrinsic
Extrinsic
Achievements
Appointments
Behavioral Momentum
Bonuses
Blissful Productivity
Cascading Information Theory
Discovery
Combos
Epic Meaning
Community Collaboration
Free Lunch
Countdown
Loss Aversion
Infinite Gameplay
Ownership
Levels
Points
Lottery
Quests
Progression
Urgent Optimism
Reward Schedules
Status
Virality
When you combine the right mix for extrinsic or intrinsic motivation personalities, you can leverage these to achieve superior results from sales reps and sales organizations. Take stock within your group of who is likely to belong to one group or the other, and apply the right levers.
Think about these game building blocks and consider their application to sales, and where you could implement them. For example, they could be part of a compensation structure, employee retention plan or customer service scores directed at the inside sales rep team. As you can see, gamification can have many avatars!
We shall stop here in this article, and continue with the next component — Game Design — in the next post.
This article first published on Focus. This is the first post in a multi-part series about: (a) the concept of gamification, (b) its business uses and applications, (c) trends and forces accelerating its importance, (d) quantitative analysis considerations, and (e) how it can used to drive sales enablement and productivity. This post introduces the concept of gamification.
Sales organizations – particularly inside sales — choose between reps managing only customers, only prospecting, or having both in their portfolio mix. This happens for a lot of reasons, such as geography, industry and product specialization of the rep or even workload and efficiency considerations.
While customers are often measured by trailing twelve month sales, prospects are all about future revenue. So which prospects does a rep focus on, and how can sales reps allocate time that yields the best future gains from both prospects and customers?
There are several simple ways you can guide sales reps towards managing their time to call these diverse customers.
Rotate based on value: Set up a pattern where the reps are calling out from low to high value, of course where the current low value customers are prioritized through scoring. For every hour, allocate 15 minutes for low value customers and prospects, 15 minutes for high value prospects and 30 minutes for high value customers. Something like this should help them work across the entire portfolio every 60 minutes:
Standardize on future value only: Using modeling and predictive methods, create a future value index for both customers and prospects. You do not have to predict an exact number. Even a range is sufficient to initiate prioritization and encourage sales reps to think about customers and prospects in the same value buckets, and keep future sales in mind.
Concentrate on similar industry or needs: Consider this scenario. A rep just sold XYZ Widgets to a customer in manufacturing in the Midwest, and you know the customer is high value, and this industry has recently shown high propensity for XYZ Widgets. Doesn’t it make sense to put it all together for the rep, so he can make the next calls to prospects that fit the same profile?
Taking real lessons learned from customers and applying analytics to a streamlined process can ensure that your reps are focused, forward thinking and acting on emerging trends and propensities. This can also avoid the partial treatment customers often get at the risk of growing your future business.
For any airplane pilot, the auto-pilot is a valuable companion. It can automate routine tasks such as maintaining altitude and direction so you are free to focus on the next tasks needed to reach your goal destination.
Inside sales teams are at it every day, making thousands of calls to prospects, seeking an appointment or a sale. They are given scrubbed lists with contact names, job title, phone numbers and a good luck pat. On the back end, managers track calls, appointments and sales. The cycle continues when reps deplete their assigned leads and it starts over again.
People like fun n’ games.
