Powering The Sales Organization with Actionable Insights
By Ameet Sulibhavi Prahlad, Senior Manager of Solutions and Value Acceleration at Qlik
As uncertainty and volatility become the order of the day, buyer behavior and preferences continue to evolve. The continuing global supply chain crisis has resulted in lost sales and market disruptions that have in some cases widely thrown off forecasts.
Sales and revenue operations professionals today face new sets of challenges such as:
Ensuring accurate forecasts and achieving sales targets in a turbulent business environment
Lacking complete visibility into the customer buying journeys
Keeping territories, comp plans, and processes updated in a fast-evolving market
Such challenges require sales organizations to evolve. This means supplementing their intuition and experience-based sales approach with data driven strategies, selling techniques and insights. Few sales organizations today are equipped to systematically generate actionable insights in real time or use insights on customers, products, channels, territories, and sellers to deploy them for predictive forecasting through Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based solutions.
There are a few pragmatic ways for sales organization to leverage data to generate real time insights that drive action for sales leaders, sellers, and sales operations teams and create business value, while working with their Business Intelligence (BI) teams.
Boosting Channel Success
Often organizations don’t have a direct line of sight into accurate and current channel partner sales data. This limits the ability to provide timely feedback and assistance on partner sales tactics that could boost sales performance. A robust channel analytics solution can be instrumental in making channel partner sales more successful through a unified view of real-time partner sales activities that fuel forecast predictions and drive sales leadership alerts on opportunities that need immediate action. Below is a day in the life where a CRO improves responsiveness and accelerates channel success and scale from real-time actionable insights on channel performance.
Day in the Life of a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) with Real-Time Actionable Insights
Improving Accuracy of Sales Forecasts
Is forecasting sales an art or science? It really depends on if you’re a seller or a sales leader, manager, or business planner.
Sellers dislike making forecasting entirely scientific, and the sales leaders / managers / business planners wouldn’t entirely go down the art route. However, as AI and ML become more prevalent, the balance is shifting in favor of making sales forecasting more scientific. To better forecast, sales organizations need visibility into the full sales process from lead to close.
Day in the Life of a Sales Executive with Real-Time Actionable Insights
Sales organizations can benefit from monitoring sales activity and performance in real time, automating data integration with CRM and sales order systems. Using automated machine learning, they can run predictions and detect variances in forecast, alert sales executives and prescribe levers to pull to address gaps. In the example above, we depict a day in the life of a sales executive being empowered with prescriptive actions to increase sales quota achievement due to improved accuracy of forecasts.
Increasing Sales Engagement with Territory Intelligence
Sales activity data is a powerful tool that can provide sales leaders and sales operations the means to assess the health of different sales territories. However, this depends on having the right quantity and quality of sales activity data in CRM systems. As tools start tapping into sales rep inboxes and calendars to automatically capture customer engagement details and verify and sync back into CRM, sales leaders and sales ops can gain a greater level of visibility.
Day in the Life of a Sales Ops Leader with Real-Time Actionable Insights
Sales Ops leaders can use sales analytics to determine whether top accounts are getting the attention they need, understand sales rep capacity and whether sales reps are talking to the right people / departments. In the example above, a day in the life of a sales ops leader shows how augmented analytics helps detect limited traction in high priority accounts, flags them automatically for follow ups and helps measure the effectiveness of these follow ups.
These snapshots show how real-time actionable insights empowers sales organizations to act in the moment and break free from the limits of historical and passive BI. To find out more about how Qlik can enable sales organizations to drive more value and action from data for impact, visit Qlik Sales Analytics.