Whether you are a rep, manager or a revenue leader, you already tell whether or not you are doing well by looking at your quota attainment. What’s much harder to do is to understand the why behind the results, and how you can improve:
- What skill gaps does your team have?
- What factors affect win rate and by how much?
- What are the best indicators of rep performance and deal outcomes?
There can be hundreds of different factors that influence the success of a revenue team, but it’s rarely obvious which of them actually move the needle.
This is why we built our new analytics page: to give you and your team the ability to peel away the layers and start getting to the truly actionable takeaways: which skills matter, what factors influence deal outcomes, and how your team can improve.
Introducing Our New Analytics Page #
The design of our new analytics page was optimized for ease of use and consumption. We wanted every rep and every team to be able to understand, at a glance, what they are doing well, where they need to improve, and what others are doing that you can learn from.
Here are some of the questions you can get answer to using our new analytics:
Team Activity
- How many meetings are we having and how much time are we spending?
- How many accounts has each rep been working?
- How much effort are we putting into reviewing calls and coaching?
Conversation Skills
- Are we able to communicate effectively and professionally?
- Are we good at holding balanced conversations?
Sales Skills
- Are we setting next steps consistently during each call?
- Are we asking questions to engage prospects and understand their needs?
- Are we multi-threading our deals (looping in multiple stakeholders)?
- Which products and features are reps pitching?
Deal Intelligence
- Are we spending time on the right deals?
Market Intelligence
- Are certain competitors coming up more often in conversations? For which team?
- What products and features come up in deals most often?
In addition, we provide these powerful levers:
See how any skill, performance metric or market indicator is trending over time.
No matter whether you want to track your team’s skill gaps or understand how often competitors are coming up in deals, seeing a snapshot in time is not enough - you want to understand what direction it’s heading in, so that you know where to focus your efforts.
Compare differences across won vs. lost deals based on historical results.
It’s important to understand how certain skills and indicators affect the team’s ability to close deals. Industry best practices can be helpful, but what’s truly eye-opening is what worked or didn’t work, specifically for you and your business.
We plan to continuously expand the set of questions we answer over time, so stay tuned!
Best Practices for Conversation Analytics #
Conversation analytics can be extremely powerful and provide many insights to your team, but it’s important to understand that not all data points may be equally relevant. Below, we’ve provided some best practices to consider when you take a look at the data.
1. Respect Diverse Communication Styles #
Each rep has his or her own style when it comes to communication. Some may be fantastic listeners able to deeply understand the prospect’s needs and pain points, while others are storytellers great at inspiring confidence. What’s needed is a balanced approach to scaling what’s working and what’s not, but also enabling each rep to lean on their unique strengths.
Sales Reps:
Just because your colleague is closing deals left and right doesn’t mean you should attempt to replicate his/her selling style. What works for that rep may not always work for you, and vice versa. Prioritize concrete skills and knowledge that is useful regardless of selling style.
Sales Managers:
As much as we all like silver bullets, avoid a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to identifying where your team needs to improve. Take the time to understand your team’s strengths and weaknesses, and tailor your coaching efforts to each individual rep.
2. Focus on the Metrics that Matter #
There are many conversation metrics that we provide, but not all metrics are applicable or relevant in all situations. For instance, talk-to-listen ratio may be very important for discovery, but matters less for a procurement or infosec discussion. As you try to leverage conversation analytics to improve performance, focus on specific metrics that matter most for your team.
Sales Reps:
Healthy competition is good, but don’t get overly distracted by leaderboards. What matters in the end is whether you are closing deals and hitting your quota, and all other metrics are just directional indicators for you to reach that goal.
Sales Managers:
Avoid having knee-jerk reactions to reps having lower performance on a particular skill compared to others. If you spot a potential skill gap in your team, start by listening to some calls to understand what’s happening and identify where specifically the rep needs to improve.
3. Filter Results to Keep Insights Relevant #
Even within a company, different teams can address different territories, verticals and account types. The right talk track and sales process may vary from one team to another. To maximize the value you get out of analytics, you want to focus on the conversations and deals that are most similar to your own.
Sales Reps and Managers:
Use filters to narrow down the data that you see. For example, if you primarily work with enterprise accounts while other teams work on smaller-size deals, use the deal size filter to filter the results down only to large deals that are similar to yours. If your territory is in a specific market that has different needs than others, use the team filter to only look at the teams that are addressing similar markets.
Tips When Comparing Outcomes #
We have some extra tips when it comes to comparing outcomes - that is, figuring out what actually worked or didn’t work based on historical deals that were won and lost.
Most deals are lost due to no decision, earlier on in the sales cycle. This means that if you compare won vs. lost deals across all stages and all date ranges, the results aren’t going to reflect the reality of what moves the needle. If you want to see accurate results, we recommend that you keep in mind these tips:
- Pay attention to your CRM hygiene. If your team is not updating opportunity stages in a timely way, the results you get are not going to be accurate - garbage in, garbage out. In particular, make sure that deals that don’t have a clear timeline to close are moved to the appropriate stage instead of being stuck in a stage forever.
- Give it time for deals to close. Filter the date range to a historical range to make sure that deals have time to reach the eventual outcome (won or lost). For example, if your typical sales cycle is 3 months, only analyze conversations more than 2 months old where most deals would have had time to close one way or another.
- Focus on the right opportunity stages. For generic win/loss analyses, you’d want to focus on earlier opportunity stages that take place equally for both won and lost deals. For specific questions such as post-POC win rate or contract negotiation success, filter down to the specific stages that matter for the analysis.
We hope that our new analytics page gives you insight into how you can improve your team’s performance and improve win rate. Next time you think about how you and your team can work more effectively, try logging into Chorus and take a look - you may find that golden nugget of information that will help you close your next deal.
