We’ve all heard the saying “data is the new oil”, but what may not be as well known is the concept behind it. Like crude oil, raw data isn’t valuable in itself. To unlock the actionable insights it contains, the data must first be accurately gathered, combined with other relevant data, and analysed. When properly done, it can bridge the gap between how you think your business is running and how it’s really running.

Doing this requires embedding the actionable insights acquired from your data into your business strategies for more proactive and intentional decision making. Energy and telco companies that recognise the importance of the data they capture and act upon it will be in an enviable position to improve the way business is conducted, and ultimately win more deals.

When Intelligent Data Isn’t Part of the Sales Journey

Data can provide a bounty of intelligence when it comes to understanding where you’re excelling and where improvements need to be made to increase sales closure rates. Let’s explore two sales scenarios – door-to-door field sales and online sales – looking at each through the lens of when data isn’t integrated into your processes.

Door-to-door field sales: Given closing the deal is the primary goal of your field reps, do you know if money is being left on the table? For example, we’ll assume that during the course of a day, a field rep knocked on 10 doors and made 1 sale. Although the good news is that a sale was made, what do you know about the 9 prospects that declined to switch providers? Do you have the insights to know

• Why the 9 prospects didn’t make a purchase?
• If any of the 9 prospects are short- or long-term actionable leads?
• If any business intelligence was captured from the 9 prospects?
• If one or more of the 9 prospects were previous customers and switched to a competitor? And if so…
• Do you know which competitor they switched to?
• Do you know why they switched such as to take advantage of a product you don’t offer, the competition offered lower rates, or provided better service?

Online sales: Are you killing the competition when it comes to online sales? If not, do you know why? Let’s face it, when customers make purchases online, they’re pretty much left to their own devices throughout the sales journey. If virtually every customer that visited your website completed a sign-up form, your sales figures would be on the rise. Since that’s not a realistic expectation, the question you need to ask yourself is – why are prospects dropping out of the sign-up process?

While both of these scenarios highlight the need to integrate intelligent data into your sales processes, data can also give you the insights to better understand your field sales reps performance and where improvements are needed.

Using Data to Shed Light on Sales Performance

The 80/20 Rule, also referred to as the Pareto Principle, states that 80% of sales are made by 20% of your sales reps. And that’s not all, a recent McKinsey & Company article discusses the performance gap between sales reps, saying that regardless of the metric used, the top 30% of your sales reps will outperform the bottom 30% by as much as a factor of 4. In an industry with high turnover, closing the skills gap sounds insurmountable, doesn’t it? Not necessarily.

The first step is to gain an understanding of what makes your best reps so good. This is where the data you collect can help. By introducing field sales rep and customer surveys, as well as technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), you’ll be able to acquire the behavioural data of your best sales reps to determine patterns in successful deals closures. These insights can then be used to refine your sales strategies by embedding digital training, coaching and field rep assessments into your workflows.

Your goal should be to introduce small incremental improvements, rather than a single sweeping change that could have the opposite effect of what you’re trying to achieve. Use the insights you gathered and a phased approach across all customer-facing parts of your company. When combined, the marginal improvements implemented will – over time – have a big impact on your organisation.

Put Your Data to Work for You

Are you arming your field sales reps with the data they need to win business? PSI Touchstone enables you to gather data and seamlessly integrate it into your sales stack. Drawing from multiple sources we help you capture and validate the data you need to close sales performance gaps and win more deals.

Our energy and telco clients gain the analytics and insights to see where prospects fall out of the sales cycle, retarget prospects that didn’t complete the sale cycle, and analyse sales performance metrics. Remember, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Don’t let another day go by without having the data intelligence you need. Contact us to schedule a 20-minute call with one of our data specialists.