What CRM data tells you about your sales methodology
No matter what sales methodology you currently subscribe to (including none at all), there are key indicators that the CRM can provide that give you significant guidance about what your pipeline is really doing. Good analytics will help uncover process problems and, sometimes, really bad behavior. Some of these analytics may require some significant cleverness in report writing (and variable set up), but here are some sales diagnostics I’m always looking for in clients’ systems (regardless of CRM vendor):
The right answer here is to make the Contact Role a requirement for advancing the deal beyond the first phase, but if you can’t enforce that at least measure the problem.
[Related: CRM backups or audit trails Yes, please]
[Related: Best practices for Salesforce.com administrators]
If you’ve got a substantial sales organization with different segments (e.g., US vs UK, commercial vs federal, telecom vs finance, enterprise vs SMB, channel vs direct), you’re going to need to break all these stats out by segment. The aggregate numbers will mask important issues that will jump off the page the instant you drill down into the segments. If you’re using a stats package for analytics, you’ll be able to flag where these breakouts are needed by looking for bi-modality or wide standard deviations.
These diagnostic indicators are interesting when you first run them, but become more important over time, particularly as you evaluate “improvements” to the sales process, reorganization, messaging, etc. This is a game of continuous improvement and tuning.
But the indicators by themselves won’t point you to specific fixes, and they mustn’t be interpreted simplistically because the problems can be as much a result of bad policy (like, “our product quality stinks”) as weak sales execution. The metrics simply say “lookee here.” What’s amazing is how few organizations routinely do that looking, or evaluate their financial model against the realities of their sales performance.