Back when I was employed at a decision support company delivering fraud analytics for healthcare providers, I would wistfully look at the OBIEE (Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition) reports of the funnel sliced and diced by stages, probabilities, amounts, age in the pipeline and even an expected revenue based on stage weighted probabilities. Quarters over quarters, the expected revenue wildly beat the internal targets, but never materialized as predicted.
The simple fact that is that a deal is either won or lost. 80% chance of winning does not materialize into a .8x the deal size by the close date; but it played over and over again for every deal won or lost.
The simple irony of the above fact is that when sales management and sales reps are planning their revenue target, they are creating a pipeline worth pursuing 3-4x the revenue sought just as a civil engineer or a mechanical engineer would add a safety factor into the structures supporting the building or the product.
Generating a larger pipeline not only means a large marketing spend, but also a significant amount of sales time spent on prospecting rather than on selling / closing opportunities in the pipeline.
Yet in today's world with sophisticated data collection mechanisms within a CRM repository like Salesforce, every plan, every action, every deal profile, every sales person's focus is captured in some form or other – structured or unstructured, numerically or behaviorally, and maintained over multiple sales cycles.
This kept me awake at night wondering why can't we take all the data we have around a well defined sales process which every company purports to have and use the corporate big data to deliver a more focused approach to deal pursuit. And why has anyone not done this before.
The Holy Grail to successful selling is to be able to focus on the deals that will be successful and discard the ones that are not going to be as early as the sales rep can. There is only a finite time that a sales rep and his extended team can spend per day chasing deals.
And out of this thought process and later due diligence was born DxC SalesSuite – innovative solutions that deliver the precision of data to support the art of selling.
What a sales manager today does intuitively by experience is brought to life through a single value grading the quality of each opportunity relative to all others in the pipeline. Big bata drives sales. Companies can now finally reap the benefits of the seeds they have sown.
