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6 Essentials of Data-Driven Selling

By: Lee Wilson

12/1/2008

3. Keep it simple.

Most sales professionals are motivated by building relationships and closing deals; if they were spreadsheet jockeys they would have gone into accounting. Your DDS project needs to recognize this and the reports you create should be simple, clean, and focus only on a few items at a time.

Ideally the initial reports should be able to fit on one printed page (landscape is fine). You might have four to five reports, but each of them should be one page in length.

For example, if you create a report of the top customers in a region, limit it to 25. Yes, you might have 153, but no one will dig through all of them. Your goal is to get a good conversation going, not to uncover every subtlety through regression analysis. Start with the top 25 customers and let the reps and managers have a conversation about what traits those 25 have in common. If it is a good conversation they'll ask for more data.

4. DDS is all about finding patterns.

The best way to find new customers is to clone your existing customers. But even reps who have some awareness of the traits their best customers share may not have any clue about how to find more districts that share those traits.

This isn't rocket science-- in fact many of the things you are looking for are quite simple and straightforward. For example, the publishing company I worked for had many products that did particularly well in large districts with high ELL (English language learners) populations. A look at most rep's top 25 customers confirmed this. The question then became: Were there similar districts where our sales numbers were low?

We generated a companion report of the leading 25 districts in each territory by enrollment and budget. Comparing our top customers with the leading districts list surfaced accounts that had simply fallen through the cracks. In many cases the sales numbers were low for a good reason (no money, competitors with a stronghold, and so forth). Having the data at hand helped the managers and reps talk through these issues. Invariably, however, there were four to five accounts where all the reps could say was that they didn't know. These accounts became a focus for reps in the coming weeks and a source of an ongoing conversation with their managers. Frequently these accounts also became significant customers.

5. Data-driven selling will make a difference at the margin.

It is not a silver bullet. A dirty little secret of the education business is that most sales organizations only add value at the margin. Once your company is established in the market, there is a base of business that is going to come in just because one educator tells another to buy your products. A good sales organization builds the business on top of this base. Adding 10 percent in sales can make the difference between a hohum and a stellar year, so small changes can have significant impacts.

In the ELL example above, finding for each rep those four to five large accounts that had fallen through the cracks was a huge part of our turnaround.

Forcing people to go out and just do a lot of cold calling isn't particularly helpful if they are calling on the wrong people. If you hired the right salespeople for the education market, they are relationship builders. Cold calling is a transactional approach, so it plays against the strength of your team. You will be better served by tapping the data to help them focus on a few key accounts where their odds of success are high.