Customer relationship management (CRM) is a powerful tool for businesses, allowing revenue and growth teams to understand their customers better and build stronger relationships. However, it's important to remember that the CRM data that you are using to make important decisions can't always be trusted. Here's why:
Most sales leaders were once top sales reps themselves!
In our work with many founders and ownership teams, we see a strong sales background with at least one person on the executive team - rainmakers who helped to build successful companies with relationships.
However, now that you are a leader, you are required to have different skills on top of selling to ensure success. It can be stressful. It can be overwhelming. Your team's success depends on you. Your company's success depends on you. The reward is high -- and so is the stress!
Growth is a team sport. Like all team sports, it is key to understand your players and focus them on the right places to win. Sharing from our experiences of transforming companies with Growth Data™, here are 3 ways a sales data strategy enables you to do just that.
Hint: It doesn't stop at building a sales pipeline.
What comes to mind when you say high-performing sales teams? According to this recent article by Forbes, high-performance sales teams aren't just defined by the year-over-year revenue gains and profitability. Rather, they share fundamental characteristics beyond their performance metrics. Here are the top 4 listed and that really resonated with me:
So much emphasis is placed on new revenue growth ---revenue targets, quotas, and new deals. But what about the revenue that slowly leaks away under the line of visibility? In our years of experience working with clients to maximize revenue potential, we’ve sealed many revenue leaks. Understanding where these revenue leaks are showing up in your sales process will help you to reach your next phase of growth much more quickly.
Successful growth companies face revenue stalls and leaks. However, they are tricky to navigate.
There’s treating the data you need to reach your goals like an afterthought. And then there’s the data-first approach. The former is typically unstructured, unsystematic, and unstrategic. The latter is focused— and above all else, geared towards producing an organization’s desired outcomes by giving leaders the data they need to drive growth.
How does the unstructured approach manifest organizationally? We think of the marketing leader who is unable to identify whether the last $100,000K campaign investment resulted in paying customers. We think of the sales leader who has insufficient leads despite the fact that their CRM/marketing system holds thousands of industry contacts. We think of the CEO who acutely needs to grow revenue but knows that sales forecasting is completely unreliable.
When revenue stalls in a multi-million-dollar company, it produces a unique form of stress for the C-suite. It’s the confusion, worry, and frustration of the success-turned-stall-story. Why do companies with the wherewithal to build themselves to such a size suddenly run out of gas? And where is their restart?
Disenchanted with your analytics' lack of ROI? You’re definitely not alone. In fact, Gartner’s findings are that 54% of leaders surveyed are disappointed with the results of their analytics investments. In their Marketing Data and Analytics 2020 survey[1], over half of the 415 marketing leaders and analytics practitioners they spoke with are “unimpressed”.
