Making sense of sales data

Yeah.

And I think that idea of making time to do the things that only humans can do at the moment and using AI in that way is very positive and I think people need that space need to understand how collecting the data should there be a kind of hand-o-matic part of that, a manual part of collecting that data.

If there is a process that involves them doing that, then they need to see some value in how that data is used to them.

And I think that process is often missing.

But I want to pick up on where the data's coming from.

So clearly, by definition, data is historical, right? So we're looking backwards, we're looking at what's happened within an organisation.

And particularly if you're looking at win rates or you're looking at revenues or you're looking at profit per unit or whatever it is that you are, works for your organization and your setup, you're looking at things that have already happened and then making a prediction on that basis about what will come next.

And, you know, we've all backed the favorite in a horse race and said, it's fallen at the first fence you know so so how do we set up some more leading indicators rather than lagging indicators that that sales people can look at crunch the data and get real-time insight which will help them move from that leading indicator to the next leading indicator whatever that will be is there a way of unpacking it in such a way that we can do that

actually believe this is the direction we are going into, that not so much the rear view mirror, as you just explained, is the main data point, but understanding what's happening now So one important element to that is that the data cycle you have fits to the sales cycle you have for your sales.

So if you have an 18-month sales cycle, then maybe a monthly update is frequent enough.

If you have a very shorter scale, like days or weeks, then you also want the data to be on that speed.

So I think one important element towards the leading indicators is that you have data on the timeframe you need based on the sales cycle.

The other thing which strikes me as important is people often work in the aggregate, an average sales time, an average deal volume and so forth.

I like this Ford versus Ferrari movie.

And what I take from that is if you drive a sports car, you really need to feel the road.

If there is a bump, you need to feel that and be able to take action from it.

If it's cushioned, if you have a big sedan, and you just glide over the road, but you don't feel what's really going on out there, then you miss a lot of information.

And I think the leading indicator comes from the fact that you feel that small stone, which was the bump in the road, the small irritation, and you have that available in a way that you can react to that.

And that ability to adjust to that data in real time, to be able to see what's happening.

Because we see organizations, and this is a generalization, and like all generalizations, it's wrong.

But fundamentally, we see quite a lot of organizations who will... actively count or rather they accord importance to the things that they can count easily rather than count the things that are really important.

And so when we get into those leading indicators, very often it's about activity.

How many visits have you done? How many meetings have you done? How many calls have you had? Our research shows that the number of calls is not that significant, albeit that the data may point to a magic number in the average sales conversation.

But what we find is what happens inside that meeting, that conversation, that interaction is massively important about whether or not things progress or stay still or go backwards in some cases.

So is there a way of gathering data about what's happening in the conversation, analysing that and giving feedback about what's working, what's not working, what's making progress? How are things advancing and is there a way of us capturing that data and being able to utilise that real time? Is that something that is now feasible or would it be distracting? What would be the way of thinking around that kind of ability to analyse?