Five Habits of Data-Driven Sales Departments

As the modern business world has increased in pace and reach, the level of pressure to succeed placed on company sales departments has risen correspondingly. In order to keep up, sales departments process a huge amount of information in any given day or week. There's data about each sales representative's interactions with potential customers, data about how much activity each sales rep conducts throughout the day, and data about whether reps are projected to meet their individual monthly and quarterly goals, just to start. The most effective and efficient sales departments use this data to their advantage by interpreting the habits and patterns in their organization that aren't working as well as possible.

That's what we call a truly data-driven sales department. These departments have several tactics that help them succeed. From the VP of Sales down to the intern who's setting meetings for the sales reps, data-driven sales departments that want to optimize their processes without adding headcount should look at these habits and compare them to what's being done today.

1. Track every action 

The first habit of an effective sales department is a willingness and ability to track every action of their daily operations. Everything needs to be recorded. I'm talking everything: from the action a salesperson takes in the process of converting a lead to the response a prospect triggers to any conversation a customer has with a support team member.

The goal is to use business analytics to uncover the patterns in the behaviors of the sales team, management team, and customer base. Those patterns are the key to making the adjustments needed to supercharge the department. They can upend a business' entire sales model, but only if there's enough data to analyze in ...