Tracking baseball stats has been part of the game since the very beginning of the sport. But, about 20 years ago, baseball’s ‘game of numbers’ changed – becoming more precise, more prescriptive – and much more powerful.
By analyzing player performance numbers in new ways, one losing team went from nearly last place to win the Western Division of the American League in 2000, 2002, and 2003. The team was the Oakland A’s – and you might know the story as “Moneyball.”
Sales leaders have an opportunity to learn something from modern baseball. As in baseball, tracking metrics in sales isn’t new. But today – like “Moneyball” – sales has the potential to capture new insights and analyze and apply them in new ways to transform sales methodologies.
Confound your competition with analytics
Quality connect rate is the biggest contributing factor to your team’s overall performance. And to understand and increase the quality connect rate, you need to monitor metrics. Metrics can tell you a lot about your sales processes and where you might need to make adjustments. Sales leaders know that:
- Every email, every phone call, every conversation impacts your reps’ performance – making insight into these activities critical
- Behavioral differences exist between top and bottom performers – by pinpointing them, you could coach the team more effectively
- With increased velocity, your reps can increase the volume of activities – increasing your team’s odds of making quota
Real-time engagement analytics give you more visibility to see rep activity levels, to quickly compare activity levels between reps, and to prioritize prospects, increasing efficiencies by focusing efforts on the best leads.
Improving visibility into rep activities
Asking your reps to do more is not the right answer. It’s being able to pinpoint which type of activity they should be doing more that will generate the right result.
Sales acceleration tools like LiveHive help you understand which activity is delivering the optimal ROI, so you can repeat it and optimize across your whole organization. With LiveHive, you get a single dashboard, where you can see exactly how many emails have been sent on a rep-by-rep basis and the effectiveness of those emails, such as open, click through, and response rates – all delivered in a real-time at-a-glance report. You can also identify best practices and share them across your organization for repeatability.
Comparing rep productivity
These analytics also make it easier to compare rep activities across the team. What is your top performing rep doing that others may not be? Are they sending more emails? Or is it the type of emails that they’re sending that’s making a difference to their success?
With LiveHive, you can look at how many activities it takes certain reps to convert a qualified lead compared to others and trace back behaviors. With more accurate metrics easily compared across the team, you can spot areas for improvement and clearly identify the activities that can help make it happen.
Working ‘smarter’ not harder
The A’s chose an unlikely catcher at the University of Alabama as a first round pick. But their selection had nothing to do with his catching or hitting ability – but rather his extraordinarily number of high walks! Their analysis had revealed that walks were critical to winning games.
Want to know how sales acceleration tools can help your reps work smarter not harder?
- Quickly identify which prospects are most likely to become quality connects
- Determine what messaging (in what email templates) has the best response rate
- Find out the right number and the type of activities that close more deals
“In baseball, every pitch, every hit, every catch or throw depends on an individual’s success or failure, so it can be given a precise numerical value. Take those numbers and analyze them dispassionately and you just might have the makings of a championship team.”[i]
With sales analytics, sales leaders have more information about their pipeline and can make smarter decisions. They can see what type of customers are engaging most frequently to filter poor leads from good one and raise your team’s productivity.
LiveHive customers are already increasing their quality connect rates up to 35% with our sales acceleration platform – measuring interactions more accurately, prioritizing prospects, and identifying repeatable processes through prescriptive analytics.
Like baseball, sales is not a pure science and never will be – but analytics have definitely become a player in the game.
[i] Mathematician Keith Devlin, “Devlin’s Angle,” Mathematical Association of America