Sales Intelligence: The Secret to Sales Nirvana

Sales Intelligence
The Secret to Sales Nirvana
Alex Jefferies
January 2009Sales Intelligence: The Secret to Sales Nirvana Page 2
Executive Summary
In October and November 2008, Aberdeen surveyed over 300 companies Research Benchmark to understand how organizations leverage sales intelligence from external Aberdeen's Research content providers to affect overall sales productivity. The phrase "sales Benchmarks provide an in- intelligence" itself refers to the external sources of information that a depth and comprehensive look company can use to improve the effectiveness of the sales force and enrich into process, procedure, the quality of leads in the sales pipeline. Common examples of sales methodologies, and intelligence include news on industry trends, general contact and company technologies with best practice information, analyst reports, targeted prospect lists, and consumer- identification and actionable generated content relating to vendor assessment. This benchmark report recommendationswill examine the benefits of incorporating sales intelligence into the early portion of the sales cycle, as well as the value in aggregating and disseminating information in a manner that protects against "information overload" by weaving content into the daily workflow of sales representatives.
Best-in-Class Performance Aberdeen used four key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in-Class "We found a system that companies: allowed people to share contacts amongst themselves. · Year-over-year increase / decrease in the amount of time sales At the time, it was new, fresh representatives spend searching for relevant company / contact way to go about getting information (on a daily basis) contacts and numbers, one that · had far fewer data quality Year-over-year performance in lead conversion rates issues." · Year-over-year performance in sales cycle time ~ Tim Walls · Year-over-year performance in the percentage of sales Senior Manager of Sales Operations representatives achieving quota Netuitive
Competitive Maturity Assessment Survey results show that the firms enjoying Best-in-Class performance shared several common characteristics:
· 72% of Best-in-Class companies currently have a process for tracking prospect engagement
· 64% of Best-in-Class companies currently have a centralized repository of marketing and product information
· 51% of Best-in-Class companies currently have executive-level support for the use of third-party information providers within sales
Required Actions In addition to the specific recommendations in Chapter Three of this report, to achieve Best-in-Class performance, companies must:
© 2009 Aberdeen Group. Telephone: 617 854 5200 www.aberdeen.com Fax: 617 723 7897 Sales Intelligence: The Secret to Sales Nirvana Page 3
· Reconcile organizational data quality issues with sales intelligence initiatives. The old adage "garbage in, garbage out" has a profound impact on top line revenue; salespeople need to be empowered with quality data to deliver quality results. As a result of this truth, organizations should carefully evaluate where they source their information from to ensure data quality. The fact that 63% of survey respondents indicated that sales automation tools are the end-user system that is most likely to have serious data quality issues suggests the need for reliable intelligence data. In order for companies to effectively map their products or services to the unique business challenges of the prospect, sales representatives must have access to accurate customer and prospect data from reputable sources. · Proactively spark the adoption of sales automation tools. Sales representatives are typically creatures of habit; therefore, the mandated use of a new sales solution among the more seasoned reps will go unnoticed unless there is incentive to adopt. Currently, 52% of Best-in-Class companies incentivize the use of a CRM / SFA solution, compared to 25% of all others. The need for complete and accurate information (71%) and the need to adhere to formal and documented sales processes (36%) were identified by Best-in-Class companies as the top two reasons for incenting the use of sales automation tools. An added concern for businesses, however, is the need to track leads through the sales pipeline. By tying a sales representative's compensation plan to CRM / SFA adopti... [download for more]