How CSOs Can Maximize Sales Analytics’ Impact

Analytics tools have proved critical to meeting the sales function’s priorities and goals, and businesses must maximize their impact. Gartner predicts that by 2027, B2B organizations that unify key performance indicators and analytics will improve customer retention and growth by 50 percent. Most chief sales officers (CSOs) leverage descriptive analytics for forecasting, assessing pipeline health, and measuring seller performance, but too few CSOs seek prescriptive analytic support to effectively deploy their sales teams and improve seller actions.

There are five actions CSOs should take to maximize the impact of sales analytics.

Action 1: Design and Develop a High-Performing Sales Analytics Function

The foundation for maximizing sales analytics is to establish a sales analytics team that can provide both the CSO and sellers the insights they need. The CSO and sales operations leader should start by establishing a clear vision and road map for sales analytics. This road map must include each of the following types of analytics:

• Use descriptive analytics to understand what happened in past fiscal periods, such as customer interactions, actual revenue, or seller commission payouts.
• Use diagnostic analytics to visualize and interact with the data in, for example, heat maps and trend reports.
• Use predictive analytics to automate the calculation of possible results based on select leading indicators. Machine learning techniques will continuously improve the accuracy of predictions and explorations, based on usage and new data.
• Use prescriptive analytics to optimize decisions and automate suggestions for the next best actions, based on a combination of leading and lagging indicators.

Next, they should identify the techniques and tools needed based on the types of analytics required. They should also identify use cases to add context that demonstrates how the analysis is applicable to real-world business problems.

Action 2: Support Effective Go-to-Market (GTM) Decisions

To manage an effective GTM strategy, CSOs need to collaborate with commercial peers based on insights about customers, competitors, and partners. This includes understanding the performance and capacity of sellers and territories, as well as anticipating the impact of external disruptions.

Sales analytics is too often overlooked as a resource by CSOs during GTM design. Using analytics to make data-driven decisions on sales strategies, segmentation and tiering, sales sizing, and territory design can increase sales effectiveness and target attainment.

Action 3: Drive Action Among Frontline Sellers and Managers

Improving seller productivity and performance through data-driven actions is a priority for CSOs. However, a recent Gartner survey showed that 84 percent of executive/senior sales leaders agree that sales analytics has not met expectations in influencing sales performance.

CSOs should start by evaluating their seller productivity metrics to better understand why top performers win. To improve any role’s performance, CSOs must equip their organizations with tailored analytics and insights. By using comparative performance metrics that compare individual sellers against their peers and analyze top performers’ activities, CSOs can more objectively identify the factors that lead to success, which helps them provide better sales coaching and motivation. Understanding the real drivers of performance enables leaders to prioritize enablement and operations efforts that make the greatest impact on sales outcomes.

Action 4: Strengthen Sales Forecasting and Pipeline Management

Forecasting and pipeline management are also top priorities for CSOs, but many are frustrated by labor-intensive forecasting processes that yield inaccurate predictions. CSOs must build robust pipeline management and forecasting processes that provide sales managers the visibility they need to manage risk and coach sellers. CSOs must evaluate their forecasting requirements, ensure opportunity tracking effectively measures deal progress, and review the correct analytics to support the forecasting design process. Over time, they must monitor and assess the performance of their forecasting and build action plans to address any remaining challenges.

Action 5: Champion Proper Sales Data Management Habits

As organizations increasingly rely on data and analytics to drive critical decision making, data management discipline becomes more critical. Data is the key to formulating a unified commercial strategy, and unlocking the efficiencies of AI for sales. For these reasons, CSOs must take an active role in defining the vision and objectives of their organizations’ sales data management programs. This includes implementing proper master customer data management programs that ensure reliable data is accessible to the right stakeholders and taking a holistic approach to governance.

Tyler Huguley is senior director analyst and Steve Rietberg is vice president analyst at the Gartner Sales Practice. Join them and colleagues at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leaders conference May 21-22 in Las Vegas.