The Big Data hype worries me. A lot. Particularly as it pertains to sales analytics. When it comes to understanding the inflection points that should be the determinants of behavior change to improve sales performance, we don’t suffer from an information deficit, we suffer from an insight deficit. Big data is perceived by some as the answer to the question. The problem however is that we often don’t know the question.

It is true that where we are today is a direct consequence of our past actions. You might therefore assume that a singular focus on finding correlations between historical data…

As you may know I published my most recent book – Account Planning in Salesforce - earlier this year. I am always nervous when I am launching a book.  I put a lot of myself into it and, even with a topic like Account Planning, I find that my writing always seems to become infused with my values, my opinions and my beliefs.  I really just don’t know any other way and I wanted the readers to get value from the book. I want them to feel that the time they spent reading it was worthwhile.

So, as you can imagine,…

I have written before about the only two reasons that you lose a sale;

1. You should not have been there (chasing this particular opportunity), or
2. You were outsold.

I know I have fallen at both of those hurdles.  Sometimes being outsold means you lost to the dreaded No Decision.  In fact according a report I read from CSO Insights this is happening 26% of the time. Ouch!

Now in most cases when the customer is making No Decision they are in fact making the right decision. They will have objectively evaluated the project, and decided that this particular project did not reach the required threshold…

Thanks to our friends over at Work.com for helping us with this infographic.

.

The data in this infographic is based largely on the Dealmaker Index Global Sales Benchmark Study.

You may be aware that I recently published my latest book called Account Planning in Salesforce.  (You can get a free extract here.) I was driven to write the book by the need for sales professionals and account teams to maximize their revenue from their existing large accounts and also to build a framework for targeting new customers in a structured more customer-solution-centric way.  It turns out that about half of sellers do not know how to maximize revenue from their existing accounts. In Account Planning in Salesforce I spent a little time presenting how I think account planning relates to…

It seems pretty simple at first, but calculating your Win Rate is not as straightforward as it might appear. In most cases sellers will think about their Win Rate as the number of wins as a percentage of the number of opportunities that were pursued. But that doesn’t tell the full story.

Let’s say I am working the four deals listed here.

• Deal A: $20,000
• Deal B: $10,000
• Deal C: $40,000
• Deal D: $30,000

Scenario 1:

In this case the results of the four sales cycles are as follows:

• Deal A: $20,000 – WIN
• Deal B: $10,000 – WIN
• Deal C: $40,000 – LOSS
• Deal D: $30,000 – LOSS

I win Deal…

The implementation of a sales playbook can be one of the most impactful initiatives for any sales organization. There are two reasons for this tremendous ROI. First, by following some simple guidelines, it can be a remarkably easy initiative to implement, and second, research shows that this results in 33% additional revenue.

We have done hundreds of Sales Playbook deployments with Dealmaker Smart Sales Playbook. Here are the 12 Elements of a great sales playbook that you should use to guide your implementation. 

1. Repeatable Winning Sales Processes

The key word here is ‘repeatable’. When everyone adopts the same sales process, there is a…

I was speaking recently at a conference on Sales 2.0 tools.  During the coffee break after my session I ended up in a conversation about sales enablement and sales playbooks. The conversation got derailed for a while as one particularly active participant wanted to debate the role of mobile and cloud technologies in the future of sales professionals. Seriously? I am not sure I understand how anyone would feel the need to ask that question. In my opinion mobile and cloud are as certain a part of our future as death and taxes – but maybe that’s just me.  Anyway,…

At The TAS Group, we just recently completed a global study of sales performance.  The full report will probably be available by late April.  If you want a copy email me ddaly (at) the tasgroup (dot) com.

The statistics are pretty revealing – so I thought I would share them with you now.

1. 33% of sales people made quota in the last reporting period

2. Only 52% of sales people say they can access the key players for a sale

3. 39% of sales professionals say they are not able to effectively uncover customer problems, and

4. 35% struggle with designing customer focused solutions

5. 59% of sales close as originally forecasted

6. Sales forecast accuracy jumps…