By Andris A. Zoltners, PK Sinha & Sally E. Lorimer
In the hunt for growth, every sales leader, whether new or seasoned, faces the same question. Where will the growth come from?
The best answers frequently come from looking at differences in performance, sales activity and market potential across different parts of the business. Better analytics enable companies to discover and take advantage of these hidden pockets of growth.
Here are several examples:
Novartis gets more out of its average performers. The global health-care company identified salespeople who were outstanding performers and isolated a set of the behaviors that set that group apart from average performers. The company developed a new sales process based on these behaviors.
In a study, newly trained salespeople realized twice the growth rate in sales when compared to a control group.
A manufacturing company accelerates growth among new hires. The company tracked performance of salespeople over their first 20 months with the company to understand how quickly new salespeople became effective, and why. A key finding was that salespeople reporting to top-performing first-line managers performed much better than salespeople working with average-performing front-liners. The difference? Top-performing managers spent more time coaching in the field and arranged for mentorship from experienced team members. So the company established new coaching expectations for front-line
managers and implemented a tracking system to ensure accountability.
A telecom company gets more business from its high potential customers. The company found “data doubles” for low-performing, high-potential customers—i.e., other customers who had a similar demographic profile but were buying much more. The company analyzed the purchase patterns and sales strategies at these more-successful accounts and shared the insights with the sales force. That information enabled salespeople to improve targeting the right products for underperforming customer accounts, thus, dramatically boosting sales opportunities.
Companies will always be thinking about their next source of growth. Today’s world of big data enables companies to analyze sales force data for new and better sources of insight.
Andris A. Zoltners is a professor emeritus of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He and PK Sinha are cofounders of ZS Associates. Together with Sally Lorimer, they are the authors of The Power of Sales Analytics.