DxContinuum Blog

Top Performing Sales Teams are 3.5x More Likely to Use Sales Analytics

September 01, 2015
By DxContinuum Staff

Salesforce.com surveyed more than 2,300 sales leaders in North America and overseas, and identified four top trends:

  • Analytics use soars among top teams
  • High performers sell more with mobile
  • Teams that sell together, win together, viewing sales as the responsibility of the entire organization, including omnichannel sales interactions
  • High performers adopt high tech, to accelerate sales processes and free up time to sell

Download the Salesforce.com report here.

Salesforce.com found that high-performing sales teams are 3.5x more likely than underperforming teams to use sales analytics. Top teams are 4.6x more likely than under-performers to rate their basic sales analytics capabilities as outstanding or very good. For these leading teams, analytics provide visibility into accounts and help dictate where to focus energy for the most productive customer and prospect conversations.

Data analysis helps sales teams make more informed decisions and find improvement opportunities. The best sales teams not only collect customer data, they also analyze and act upon that data to make more informed, behavior-based decisions that fuel customer success. 

High performers are moving beyond basic sales analytics to gather insights across the entire customer lifecycle. While 19% percent of sales teams are currently using predictive analytics, 26% are piloting or plan to use it in the next 12 to 18 months.

2015 State of Sales

Salesforce-analytics-use-in-2015

Source: Salesforce.com, 2015 State of Sales: Technology and performance insights from 2,300 global sales leaders

 

Gartner agrees about the value of predictive analytics for sales teams. Gartner Research Director Todd Berkowitz finds that “SaaS-based predictive analytics applications are helping B2B salespeople and marketers more effectively generate demand and win deals.” Gartner, “Market Guide for SaaS-based Predictive Analytics Applications for B2B Sales and Marketing” (subscription required), 23 January 2015, G00271490.

Predictive lead scoring has received the most attention in the marketplace and is the most common in terms of Gartner inquiries because it most directly impacts marketing and addresses an increasingly common problem. With the changes to the buying cycle, traditional two-dimensional lead scoring is becoming less reliable in predicting the likelihood of a deal closing. High performing sales teams are augmenting fixed rules using firmographic, demographic and behavioral information from Salesforce.com or other customer relationship management (CRM) lead management systems.

Predictive Applications Across the Sales Funnel and Beyond

Gartner-predictive-analytics-uses

Source: Gartner, Todd Berkowitz, “Market Guide for SaaS-based Predictive Analytics Applications for B2B Sales and Marketing (subscription required), 23 January 2015, G00271490

 

Predictive lead scoring addresses multiple use cases. The most common one is "filter and prioritize." While having too many leads can seem like a good problem, not all of them will be high quality. Predictive lead scoring helps identify the marketing-qualified leads most likely to close (based on a predictive lead score) and allows salespeople to prioritize their follow-up and outreach on those companies and individuals.

These augmented models have generally proven to be far more accurate than traditional lead scoring at predicting the likelihood of a lead converting into an opportunity and closing. The other common use case addresses the problem of not enough good leads and allows marketers to improve segmentation, nurturing and even marketing spend by modeling the likelihood of specific content, channels and activities to produce leads most likely to close.

Predictive analytics offerings such as DxContinuum span the sales funnel, including lead and opportunity scoring, pricing, and renewal / upsell and cross-sell.

DxContinuum customers have accelerated their lead-to-deal conversion by up to 2x, deal size by 20% and sales velocity by 25% using DxContinuum predictive analytics with their Salesforce.com, Oracle Sales Cloud and marketing data.

You can too. To learn about how predictive analytics can add value to your sales team, contact us at info@dxcontinuum.com.

DxContinuum Staff

Written by DxContinuum Staff