From the course: Sales: Data-Driven Sales Management
What to watch out for
From the course: Sales: Data-Driven Sales Management
What to watch out for
- Data-driven sales management is all about having the right information at the right time to make meaningful and objective decisions. Remember, a single data point should merely serve as a conversation starter. That conversation should lead to additional questions and experiments and things you can do to improve your sales results. One of the first things we do with sales teams is start by tracking their activity. If you want to be an effective sales manager, you need this type of pulse on your business all the time. When we start with tracking activity we want to see what people are doing on a regular basis. How many phone calls did they make? How many prospects did they see? How many past clients did they visit or how many site visits did they go on? You get the idea. The problem with asking for this type of information is it can be gamed, especially if we're not paying attention. We often have sales organizations that start tracking activity so now we've got this data of saying how many times they did this or how many times they did that. The clever salesperson says, "Well, I'm just going to say I sent 20 emails yesterday "and made 15 phone calls." That seems fine on the surface but there's a few pitfalls that as sales managers we need to be looking for. This can happen if we don't have a solid handle on activity. More importantly, if we're simply looking at numbers and not the quality of the information provided, then there's a good chance those efforts can be gamed. For example, vague notes should be unacceptable. We need to give ourself a way to say that these types of notes won't work. Your tools and your reporting procedures should give you the opportunity to push back or to ask for more. In the best companies I've worked with we put together a system that provides a daily snapshot of all activity. There's a simple way for sales managers or leadership to push back, to deny a note, or to ask for more information. This is what data-driven sales is all about. The data is useless unless you're using it to effectively manage your team. Look, at the end of the day, most people are good. But when we implement something new there will often be an attempt to try and find an easy way just to make the boss happy. We can't be overly paranoid about people gaming the system but we can become better managers by setting ourselves up for success and giving ourselves the tools to effectively manage our teams.