There is a lot of content out there about leveraging visualization to better strategically lead a sales team. Most sales leaders and sales operations experts understand the value of utilizing visualization to assist in decision making and sales optimization. Still, the scenarios in which data visualization can be most effective remain vague. To help with your data visualization efforts the “Product Leadership Group” at IncentAlign has listed the:
Top 5 use cases for Data Visualization
5) Territory Alignment/Design
There is no better time, place, or scenario that data visualization aids in the operations of a sales team. Given all the factors that need to be considered in territory alignment, the seemingly simple act of laying data over a map interface can transform the way sales operations teams balance workloads, maximize revenue, and minimize travel time. http://incentalign.com/products/salesalign-territory/
4) Gauging rep performance – Truly understanding success
A sales rep with the highest sales numbers may only being tapping into a fraction of total available market opportunity. A lower performing rep may be maximizing their opportunity and owning their market. Perhaps it is time to give this sales professional more territory or a promotion, and ask the leading sales rep why they are only hitting a fraction of the available market share?
3) Spotting areas of growth before the competition
If your sales team beats the competition by attacking verticals then visualization is imperative to success. Knowing where to send your horses and where to spend your selling time is crucial. There is no better way to gauge vertical specific insights than by seeing it unfold in a visual manner.
2) Framing your perspective – Putting things into scale
A picture says 1,000 words. Seeing it can help you understand the scale of a situation and gain a new perspective to make the small but important sales leadership decisions.
1) Growing what you already have
Visualizing sales data not only helps drive new account acquisition, but can help you align your up-sell and cross-sell efforts to your current customer base. Better understanding what opportunities to attack will yield greater returns.
Please let us know if you have any questions regarding visualization. Also, we would highly recommend that if you are looking at leveraging visualization for your sales team that you do it the right way. Doing it the right way means integrating predictive analytics with visualization.
Thanks, and we hope you found this information useful for driving your sales at your company.
Regards,
Team IA
Watch the SalesAlign View Demo Video – http://incentalign.com/demo/
July 22nd, 2010
May 3rd, 2010
The team at IncentAlign is excited to introduce the latest version of SalesAlign View. SalesAlign View gives sales teams a consolidated view of their sales data, along with predictive statistical insights that drive sales revenue.
Too often the information needed to make important strategic decisions is dispersed in different databases. Time, effort, and resources are required to gather and interpret the data, and the delivery of the information is complicated and non-intuitive. SalesAlign View, with the help of IncentAlign’s “Predictive Intelligence Engine”, solves these problems by giving the right information, to the right people, at the right time, in a dynamic visual manner.
SalesAlign View - Visualization with Predictive Analytics
With SalesAlign View, sales leadership can…
- find growing markets and align for success before the competition
- better understand the true cost of sales
- determine indicators of rep performance / productivity
- better forecast expected territory and vertical revenue
Sales Professionals are empowered with predictive analytics on current leads and current accounts…
- probability of close
- expected customer lifetime
- the product most likely to be sold to a specific customer
- the Sales Rep most likely to close a lead
- the probability of retention/loss of a current account
- the action most likely to up-sell an account
Check out a video demo of the product right here – http://incentalign.com/viewdemo
Regards,
Team IA
December 16th, 2009
Aligning your sales team for success is one of the most important decisions a sales leader makes. How your team and territories are structured can have a tremendous impact on your top-line revenue and sales efficiency. Sales territory alignment also happens to be one of the most difficult sales operations tasks to get right, and as a result, can be an incredibly frustrating and time-consuming process.
To help, the team at IncentAlign has prepared a list of the top 5 factors to consider when structuring your sales territories in 2010. We hope you find this useful.
SalesAlign Territory screen shot
The top 5 factors to consider when designing sales territories in 2010
1) Sales Territory Potential
The first step in territory alignment is gaining an understanding of the territories you will be assigning. Although this can be as simple as understanding the number of accounts, the historical spend and the number of businesses in a territory, true insight comes from understanding territory potential. This means understanding what you’ve sold to whom, having an accurate prediction of what you will sell to which accounts and territories, and an understanding of the total addressable market. Essentially, this comes down to having an innate understanding your CRM and finance data, while having access to great market data.
2) Sales Team Intelligence
A key part of aligning a sales rep to their assigned territory is the sales rep themselves. Too often sales reps are not an input into the decision. Instead, alignment is adjusted based on their feedback after the fact. In order to truly optimize and maximize revenue, sales management should tap the collective intelligence of the sales team going into the alignment process. Utilizing your sales reps’ contacts, past customer relationships, personal relationships, intuition for account growth/churn, and hidden knowledge (large accounts which will close in the near future) is the key to achieving the best alignment. Sales teams that do not successfully collect this knowledge and put it into action are flying blind compared to their competitors.
3) Travel Time
How much time will your sales team spend on the road? Optimizing account coverage and travel time will result in productivity gains (more time spent actually selling) and lowered cost for the sales team. While travel time is very important, its importance must be weighed against the specifics of your team and measured against potential gains. Firstly, travel time should be measured in a realistic way – it takes longer to travel 2.5 miles in Tokyo than it does in western Nebraska. Secondly, travel time should be a cost-benefit trade off. Ask yourself – could a slight increase in travel time mean a larger increase in sales potential?
4) Continuity
What is the impact of change on your existing sales relationships? Sometimes change is unavoidable – What if there is turnover? What if the sales team size changes? But change can also be great for a sales team. There is certainly a point of diminishing return regarding change, ultimately, the goal of sales operations should be to realign the inefficiencies and under performing accounts/territories, while keeping the productive relationships intact. The key to doing this the right way, is having strong analytics and holding your finger on the pulse of the sales team to extract their knowledge of what is working and what isn’t.
5) Workload Balance
Do you divide territories equally or do you give greater potential/workload to higher performing reps? This question raises great debate amongst sales managers and strategists. However the truth is that each team is different and management philosophy is just as varied. That is why we recommend finding a strategy that is right for your organization. The key is to have the right analytical tools to measure and balance sales rep workload with consideration of continuity, travel time, and sales team intelligence.
Sales territory alignment is one of the most important decisions your team will make all year. It can also be a tremendous time sink for sales operations, management, and the sales team. The questions to ask yourself are – How long does it take your team to figure this out? How much value do you put on your time? Do you have access to the right data? Do you have an approach that weighs the right factors? Do you have access to the right tools?
We hope you found this information useful and that it will provide value as you align your sales territories 2010. For more information on territory alignment you can access the IncentAlign website — www.incentalign.com. Also, if you have any questions or would want to learn more about leveraging data, predictive analytics, and collective intelligence for your sales team please feel free to contact us.
Happy Holidays, Happy Selling, and Cheers to 2010,
Team IncentAlign
November 30th, 2009
The secret to achieving success in any walk of life begins with defining success: you need to understand what success looks like, and measure your progress against that goal. Too often, we forget to keep the goal in mind, and we measure success based on how far we’ve come, or some other metric which we choose for no other reason than that it’s easy to measure.
Unfortunately, we see this all the time in sales and marketing organizations. If an organization’s goal is to maximize revenue and profit, then the sales team’s goal is to sell to more revenue and profit maximizing customers. The marketing team’s goal should be no different!!! However, because marketing is often seen as an enabler to sales (driving interest, providing leads, etc), marketing success is often measured from a point before true success is achieved. It may be easier to measure marketing by their ability to provide sales with sales ready leads, but is this what is best for the organization?
Great marketing divisions are very data driven. They build complex lead scores based on many factors, including measures of prospect responsiveness, level of interest, and readiness to buy. They continue to nurture those leads until they hit a specific level of interest and then hand them to the sales team.
But are these leads ones which will enable the sales team to maximize revenue and profit? Are the leads they’re nurturing and handing off likely to be customers who will:
- generate good revenue,
- remain customers a long period of time, and
- close with minimal effort?
Unfortunately, marketing is often several steps away from the sales outcome, which makes measuring success really difficult. As a result, marketing often focuses on a prospect’s level of excitement which is very different from the odds that a particular prospect will become a valuable customer.
The secret is to measure marketing success with the end in mind – a sales centric approach. Sales are trinary: you either win a deal, lose a deal, or a prospect pushes a decision into the future. With the right analytics tools (shameless plug for our SalesAlign Suite), it’s easy to tell how likely a particular lead is to close based on previous sales history. Once you understand how likely any particular lead is to close, marketing can generate and nurture leads that will be of high value to a sale force. Our whitepaper, “Winning through Smart Lead Scoring & Routing” (available for download at: http://incentalign.com/whitepaper/) discusses the benefits and challenges of this approach.
Measuring from the goal, not start, means that marketing and sales can be on the same page driving towards the same goals with the same ROI metrics. When building the next generation sales organizations, we should take some advice that grandma could have told us – never put the cart before the horse.
Best,
Greg
November 16th, 2009
It’s Jack O’Holleran (Vice President, Sales and Business Development) and Derek Choy (Vice President, Products) here. We are two of the co-founders at IncentAlign and are very excited to make our first blog post.
With Dreamforce quickly approaching, it is timely that here at IncentAlign, we are announcing our new whitepaper: “Winning through Smart Lead Scoring & Routing”. Dreamforce is all about cloud computing, improving sales, sharpening marketing, and better collaboration. Our new whitepaper describes how companies can increase sales, make better use of marketing, and grow market share by using cloud computing powered predictive analytics, and collective intelligence.
We discuss how to optimize the lead conversion process through:
- analytical lead scoring,
- knowing which leads will close with the least amount of time and effort, and
- improving lead routing.
It is about routing the right lead to the right rep.
We wrote this whitepaper for sales and marketing executives searching for a way to make a big impact within their organizations. Since co-founding IncentAlign, we have talked with many 100’s of sales executives looking to do exactly that – deliver a big improvement to their top line, in the easiest and most efficient way. With these conversations as an input, we are outlining an approach which has innovative strategic vision but is still practical in a day-to-day sense, drawing upon Jack’s hands on experience in sales, and Derek’s experience working with sales teams and specialization in sales force effectiveness at BCG.
Our whitepaper is available for download at: http://incentalign.com/whitepaper/
Have a read, a think, and let us know what your thoughts. Or better yet, if you’re at Dreamforce please say hello.
Jack and Derek
October 9th, 2009
Welcome everyone to our new blog. I’m Greg, the CEO of IncentAlign. Since founding IncentAlign, we have spoken with dozens of sales experts and hundreds of executives. Our goal in writing this blog is to help convey much of what we have learned.
We are numbers people, but we realize that most of the time the numbers used within sales organizations either are not accurate or are not actionable. We’ve all seen:
- Revenue lost due to poor customer understanding
- Forecast based off of stages that have no relationship to what will actually happen
- Valuable leads that are not pursued because front line sales reps don’t understand their value
- Hours or days spent on building reports which then end up on bookshelves
These are just a few of the problems that result from bad data or poor execution on data.
Over the next few weeks and months, we hope to dive into these issues and many more. In particular, we plan on leveraging the latest views, strategies, and techniques on sales territory alignment, lead allocation, lead routing, sales force optimization, and sales productivity. We hope you will find this helpful and look forward to any feedback.
Best,
Greg