(upbeat music)
- Hi, I'm Eric Keiles Chief Marketing Officer for Square 2.
We help companies develop powerful sales
and marketing programs to really drive revenue.
This is the seventh video in a seven videos series
that talks about sales enablement strategy.
We're trying to help people build the perfect recipe
that they can build their own sales enablement program
and really drive some revenue.
In our last and final video, we want to talk about data.
Now data is sometimes dry,
but data is really critical.
In fact, sales enablement has a real data problem,
because if sales enablement
is all about ramping up sales reps
and improving performance over time,
but all that data is all over the place.
Sales enablement people really spend a lot of time
looking at a variety of different platforms and data sources
where they can get the information
that help the sales team close some deals.
And don't forget about all the spreadsheets they're creating
to aggregate that.
So in today's episode,
we're really gonna cut to the chase
of what you should be looking at
and how you can manage that data.
Here's a couple of reasons
about why applying data is very complex.
One, you gotta figure out the right resources
to get the content in the hands of the salespeople
at the right time,
to help them sell more effectively, right?
So that's a whole conversation in itself.
Also, we have to train the salespeople.
They have to understand
how to take someone through the process
in a somewhat uniform process
so that the company story, voice and tone
are all consistent.
And then we have to measure all these different data sources
that have ongoing activity
and try to figure out what adjustments we need to make
that are necessary for continuous improvement.
Look, there's a lot of places where sales data lives, right?
You have your content delivery platforms like Seismic.
You have sales training systems
where people are actually getting data
on how they're improving their sales tools.
You have customer relationship managers,
the CRM like Salesforce has a wealth of data as well.
Also there're sales engagement platforms,
like in other words Cadence tools
that are looking at the rhythms of the sales process.
There's conversational intelligence
which are call recording system
so that we record what our salespeople are saying
and then analyze it using artificial intelligence.
That's a whole boatload of data right there.
And of course we have a million spreadsheets.
Look, the CRM is still the absolute most important tool
when it comes to selling, right?
But most companies still use the CRM as the primary source
for sales activity data.
The CRM is also critical for data related to the pipeline
but today the CRM is no longer the single source of truth
when it comes to sales activity data.
More and more companies
are tracking sales activities directly
in those platforms that use data
instead of just putting stuff into the CRM.
Take a platform like Gong.
Gong records every single conversation
that your sales reps are having
and it's looking for specific, phrases, competitors names,
so that it can pull all those out of those conversations,
analyze that,
and then feed sales leadership
things that they should be doing better
or maybe they're not doing it all.
Those are different ways to get data
that aren't people just putting stuff into the CRM.
And they're good for discovering what's working
and what isn't too.
But sales enablement teams and their sales managers
can use that data to improve call scripts
how they can coach individual salespeople to be better
and so forth.
With so much data and so many resources,
the challenge for sales enablement teams
is how do we pull it all together.
With a comprehensive view of what each sales rep is doing,
it's possible to figure out
what's working and what isn't,
in the absence of a single view
it's difficult to find any kind of signals
in all that noise.
So here are three hurdles that you have to overcome
to make this happen.
One, you gotta figure out a way
to integrate multiple data sources.
And that's where software platforms become very effective.
You have to get the data at the sales rep level,
you got to see what individual sales reps are doing
and then compare them to one another or industry benchmarks.
And then you have to be able to pull that data
and visualize it so that over time you're getting insights
and how to fine tune it and make better decisions.
Once you have all the data
coming in to whatever tool you choose,
now, you can start to make scorecards.
And sales scorecards really power
the sales enablement process.
Tools like Brainshark put the power of sales data
directly into the hands of the sales enablement team
by automatically creating a data warehouse in the Cloud
for any business using Salesforce or the HubSpot CRM
and that makes it a lot easier
to once again aggregate all this data.
Well, great, now you have all the data,
what metrics would you track?
So here are six key metrics
I'd love you to start tracking immediately.
One, is obviously your overall win and loss rate, right?
We wanna figure out how many were winning
versus how many we're pitching.
Two, we wanna look at the sales cycle length.
Did it used to take 90 days to close a deal,
maybe we could do it in 60 days
and get those customers signing up faster.
We also wanna look at sales rep onboarding time.
How fast does it take a new rep
to get onboarded and effective?
And that's important
because the faster we can get the sales reps onboarded
the more effective our sales team will be.
Of course, we wanna look at quota attainment.
How many people are hitting their actual monthly sales goals
and is the group, the sales team
hitting their quotas as well.
And that's important to match up.
Where did we fall short?
What can we do better next month?
I want you to also look at lead to customer conversion rate.
How many total leads do we get?
And how many of those do we convert into a customer?
That'll give you once again an idea
of sales and marketing alignment
and what we can do to adjust that
maybe on the marketing end.
And then finally
because we really are talking about sales enablement,
we wanna make sure that the tools we're providing
to the sales team are being used.
So let's look at the usage rate
and make sure that all of our sales teams are really living
in that sales enablement tool.
Listen, providing clean and timely data
to your sales enablement team
helps them to drive better performance.
And that is the name of the game.
This concludes our seven step video series
on sales enablement.
I hope we got you thinking differently
about what you can do to cure some of the problems
that you might have driving revenue.
And if you want to connect with me personally
I'd more than happy to have an hour sit down
we could talk about your sales enablement strategy
and help you drive towards the goal line.
Thank you so much for listening today.
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