In the recent Gartner webinar 

Panel Discussion: 8 Questions to Prepare CSOs for Postpandemic Success

Which you can access here,  Steve Herz, Maria Boulden and Dave Egloff from Gartner talk about companies needing to be data driven.  Here at DLA Ignite, we agree with that 100%.

As Gartner say in this webinar "sales leadership cannot wing it anymore" they then say that "the CFO cannot live on anecdotal comments, they need facts to back things up".

The last 18 months have been brutal for sales forecasting, one minute you have a "dead cert" deal and the next moment your sponsor was laid off.

One of our clients, a large US software company said they had a number of deals, where they had done everything they had needed to do to win the sale and then at the last moment, Covid killed all spend.  Their comment was "there is no play book for a pandemic". 

This is one of the many reasons why we need to get data driven in sales.

So how do we get data driven in sales?

In this blog I explain what digital measures look like and in this blog I explain what the outcome of a digital sales project looks like.

Measuring analogue sales

In the old world of analogue sales, you had how many calls a person made, the entries in the CRM and the amount of business a person closed.  We all know that salespeople scam this and we al know salespeople that put dreams and hopes into a CRM.

You cannot run a business on hopes and dreams.

Measuring digital sales

In digital you can measure all the leading indicators, you can see if a salesperson's network is growing or if it isn't.  You can measure how many likes and comments a salesperson gets.  For a salesperson this is gold and of course if a salesperson isn't having conversations they are not going to make their number.

These numbers can be used by the CFO to see how on track the business is and Finance can get visibility of these leading indicators way before CRM.

And it's binary, if a salesperson is contributing and if they are not contributing, you can measure it. 

Just to repeat myself, in this blog I explain what digital measures look like and in this blog I explain what the outcome of a digital sales project looks like.

Just think about how you can run a business, knowing all of these leading indicators at your fingertips. No waiting for reports. No needing to guess how accurate the CRM is. No need to work out of the salespeople are telling the truth.  No need to guess if you should invest in the business.  No need to guess if a salesperson is contributing.

Everything you need to know to run both the a sales team and a business.

So who's doing this?

In case you missed it, the Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch have banned cold calling and have moved all their people to social selling. This isn't some trendy tech company that might have decided to do this on a whim, this is a very conservative financial services company that has made a decision based on data.

But surely cold calling has a better ROI than social selling?  Not according to Merrill Lynch.

"They will also be encouraged to contact prospects over LinkedIn, which has a higher hit rate than cold calling"

The CRO (chief revenue officer), Richard Eltham of Namos Solutions, of one of clients posted a comment on LinkedIn about social selling. See here.

“Social selling is not an option now it is the way of the world and you either learn and execute it or fear getting left behind” 

Kevin Murray who is the Head of Sales at MacArtney Underwater Technology recently posted about his success with social selling here and wrote an article about the transformation that has happened in sales here.