Sales and Marketing Management

Senior executives want to know that sales priorities are being set effectively and that the sales pipeline is being efficiently managed. Summarized and trended views of the sales pipeline is the starting point. A good and hopefully growing proportion of opportunities should be found in later, close-to-closing stages. Over a time horizon, for example by quarter for the past 5 quarters, can reveal whether the trend is changing in a positive or negative manner.

Similarly, pipeline velocity is vital for driving more revenue through your sales pipeline. Analyzing your pipeline should show a healthy number of opportunities that are relatively "young" and that the "older" opportunities are clustered in the later stages. Reviewing aging over a number of quarters helps you clearly understand your sales cycle, how it might be changing, and can also lead to changes in marketing or sales strategies that will increase your pipeline velocity.

Analyzing stage to stage conversion rates and trending them over time will pinpoint where "leaks" are occurring or worsening. Analyzing stage to stage conversion rates and trending them over time will pinpoint where "leaks" are occurring or worsening.

A variety of additional views can be valuable depending upon your business and strategy, such as by region or other geography, sales rep or channel, and type of customer (new or existing).

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems don’t reveal changes in data, making it hard to proactive manage sales pipeline. By using Decipher, sales teams can view sales pipeline movements, such as what has changed in the pipeline since the beginning of the month or quarter.

Visualize changes in your sales pipeline and drill-down to get visibility into deals which have increased or decreased in value, have moved forward or backward, have had close dates accelerated or delayed, have increased or decreased in probability to close or have won or lost. By focusing on pipeline changes, sales managers can quickly take corrective actions to avoid surprises at the end of the quarter and to eliminate risks in sales forecast.

Do you know at what interval to contact your sales leads in different stages of the sales cycle? Is weekly follow-up with a prospect in qualification stage too little or too often for your business? Decipher tells you the optimal duration between activities at different stage of the sales cycle for winning deals. It also analyzes lost opportunities and provides insights whether longer or shorter duration between the activities is the real cause of lost deals.

We all know what Sales Activities look like, right? Sales Activities are the execution of all your hard work planning and preparing. These activities may include the sales calls and meetings, negotiations or follow-ups, closing a deal or order taking, and relationship building and networking. Easy to manage? Easier when you are prepared and carry out your plan. In order to get the most out of your sales team, it’s essential that target quantities of each of these activities that will produce winning results are identified, and each salesperson’s quantities of activities are measured against the target.

Does your sales team spend too much time on lost deals as compared to won deals? Comparing Average Number of Activities for Losses to Average Number of Activities for Wins will give you insights on when you should take the loss and focus your scarce resources to the next opportunity. The intent is to create a combination strategy that optimizes the activities of your overstressed sales force and supports that optimal approach with a plan that provides clear direction and firm support for their efforts.

When does a lead go cold? How does contact efficiency impact qualification and close rates? The handoff between sales and marketing may be more important than ever before. Timeliness of lead routing may be the most important factor for success. For example, failing to follow up on web inquiries (rather than waiting 24 hours!) may be hurting your chances of making a contact that turns into a sale. The speed of first attempt (“time to first dial”) to a newly generated lead correlates with a significant increase in the number of qualified leads.

Lead generation is an investment for a company. It takes time and effort to gather or create leads, not to mention money. Thousands of dollars may be spent on Marketing, SEO, and purchasing. Each lead is a potential conversion, but lead generation can become an organizational nightmare and a wasted investment if leads are not followed-up on time.

Lead Responsiveness by Reps
Do you know which reps are more efficient in contacting newly generated leads? Does their efficiency correlates with sales results? Decipher provides the insights needed to improve lead response which in turn increases qualified leads and sales results for each rep.

Research indicates that as many as 80% of sales leads are neglected or mishandled. You certainly can't afford that kind of inefficiency with your most critical sales opportunities. Are you tracking leads and opportunities which had no activities today? This week? This month? Sales growth can easily be improved simply from capturing those neglected sales opportunities. To build lasting relationships, you must check in with leads and opportunities on a regular basis.

Maintaining or better yet improving the yield of your sales pipeline over time is an important sales result metric. Yield is the ratio of closed sales to number of prospects being tracked in your sales pipeline. A weakening sales yield signifies falling close rates or can indicate pursuit of poor quality sales prospects (for example, poor prospects may emanate from weak or deteriorating lead generation programs).

Evaluating your won and lost sales by attributes such as customer type, industry, product, revenue size, or profitability can yield powerful insights about selling priorities and performance. Of equal importance, it can be used to improve sales forecasts by refining the current forecast based on win / loss analysis results.

Revenue concentration is an analysis that identifies customer relationships that correlate to high revenue generation (e.g., large order sizes, repeat sales and short replenishment cycles). Sorting these results by attributes such as product type, customer type, or marketing channel are very powerful tools to determine strategies that can improve sales results going forward.

Pricing is a critical component of sales and marketing strategy. To begin pricing analysis look at the average sales price – across time, sales reps, regions, channels, and products. Further opportunities can also be uncovered by determining if total sales price is being aided -- or hindered -- by effective cross or up-selling of additional products or complementary services.

Profitability is often an elusive and poorly utilized area of sales analytics. When the effort to assemble profitability data is undertaken, however, the payback is usually significant. While metrics focused on quantities and revenue are critical to any business, decisions based on sales results can be improved many times over by adding views of profitability by product, sales rep, region, or channel.

Analyzing the average time from order to delivery to the customer, trended over multiple time periods gives important insight into your best and worst areas of delivery performance and how that is changing over time. Additional views by dimensions such as product, customer, region (or other geography), or channel can give insights that further identify where extra management attention should be given.

Averages can be misleading if specific areas, specific order types or specific customers have significant variation to the average. Aging your backlog isolates where these variations exist and improves understanding of causes and possible resolution.

Monitoring trends over time and diving into periods where changes have been significant will reveal if positive changes in this ratio are due to increases in orders, and if it is a positive and sustainable trend, or conversely is due to difficulty in fulfillment that is hampering booking of the sales backlog as revenue in a timely fashion.

For example, use Average Sales Size to identify below average orders that have upside opportunity for cross or up-sell (and setting priorities and goals accordingly)