Why Do You NEED Sales Intelligence and Why is Purchasing it Not Enough?

“Sales management, for the most part, is stuck in the 19th century. The problem isn’t just archaic tool or organizational structures; the fact is that a majority of sales managers don’t understand that their job is to enable sales reps to do their job better, not control them” – Steve Reeves, Founder of FrontOfficeBox.com.

This quotation in Aberdeen’s sales intelligence study perfectly describes the disconnect that exists between the purchase of a sales intelligence tool and the success of the tool as exemplified by metrics within the sales department. Aberdeen’s 2009 study measured the successes of “Best-in-Class” (top 20%) versus “Industry Average” (middle 50%) and “Laggard” (bottom 30%) organizations based upon 4 key performance criteria:

• Year-over-year increase / decrease in the amount of time sales representatives spend searching for relevant company / contact information
• Year-over-year performance in lead conversion rates
• Year-over-year performance in sales cycle time
• Year over year performance in the percentage of sales representatives achieving quota

Not surprisingly, the Best-in-Class companies achieved increases of more than 50 percent in all of these performance areas, but what is more interesting is how much these rates fall in companies where sales intelligence may be used, but it has not been implemented correctly.

From the top 20% in the industry to the middle 50%, the rate of improvement drops an average of about 25%. Year-over-year improvement for the “Industry Average” class hovers around 25%, as opposed to the 50% or more increases for the Best-in-Class companies. The numbers are even more staggering when looking at the “Laggard” class; these companies saw at best a 3% improvement, which resulted in an 5% average decrease in personal performance improvement in the company’s sales reps, where the Industry Average and Best-in-Class reps saw 1% and 15% increases, respectively.

Obviously, just purchasing sales intelligence tools is not enough to decrease research time and increase lead conversion rates, sales cycle time, and reps hitting their quotas. And in this economy, if you are in the bottom 30% and not correctly utilizing these tools, it has resulted in a decrease in performance rather than just minute increases. This indicates that now is NOT the time to slack; it is the time to get your act together.

You cannot just give your reps a map and expect them to drive from point A to point B if you haven’t taught them how to drive, or even more fundamentally, how to read a map.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107