So, you set your sales goals, got stakeholders on board, and launched your campaign. Now that it’s been running for a while, you’re faced with a mountain of data and some critical decisions about using it. Where do you put your energy? Sales analytics can help.
According to Forbes, data-driven companies are 19 times more likely to stay profitable. However, many people who run sales campaigns (because of a lack of experience or ego about how things “should” be) aren’t very good at using data to guide their campaigns.
As online marketplaces become saturated and people’s information gets more accessible, knowing how to use your collected data (especially in today’s world, where everyone has access to a vast volume of data) is crucial.
“It’s like hiking a lesser mountain than Everest, where there are multiple places where you’d want to stop along the way. There’s bad weather and visibility. So you have to be interpretive about the best route to get there. And if you don’t stop and keep looking at analytics and understand what the present situation is, you’ll never know how to adapt next. It’s not something where you can pick the right course from Basecamp. You have to keep going to see how things are turning out and then alter as you go.”
- Ian Fitzgerald, founder of Allied Revenue
Allied’s team has over 50 years of combined experience driving revenue growth through effective sales campaigns. We’ve been measuring and leveraging campaign data since long before data was easy to collect.
Understanding Sales Analytics for Campaigns
Knowing how to leverage sales campaign analytics is critical for several reasons:
- Sales Analytics help create realistic expectations by aligning campaign goals and stakeholder ideas with performance data.
- By providing a clear view of each campaign’s progress, analytics empower decision-makers to make informed choices about where to allocate limited resources.
- If used properly, analytics can help companies test and refine their approaches by identifying which variables drive campaign success.
Understanding sales analytics is critical to assessing the success of a sales or email campaign. You can collect all the data you want, but you’re putting yourself at risk if you misinterpret key points or lean too heavily on one data point. But before you drill too deeply into the data, it’s essential to check the “intangibles.”
Check things that aren’t easily measured before you start making changes.
Here are the first few questions that we ask when we’re evaluating sales analytics at Allied Revenue:
1) Are we producing the deliverable?
Think about the goals that you set at the beginning of a campaign. If your campaign produces the desired results, it’s best not to go around changing things left and right. You can always use data to tweak and optimize, but don’t try to reinvent the wheel if things are working.
2) How do stakeholders feel about the campaign outcome?
Are clients or members of your organization satisfied with the results of your campaign? As basic as it may sound, taking the emotional temperature of the people most invested in the campaign before making changes is essential.
3) How is rep morale?
The sales reps are on the front lines of your campaign, fighting to move the campaign forward. Check in with them! Are they getting small or big wins? If not, what do they need to be successful?
Once you’ve checked the above, start digging into your data to see what’s working and what you can double down on to make your campaign more successful.
Key Metrics in Sales Analytics
Once you’ve assessed your campaign’s health, it’s time to review the data to see what can be improved. It’s important to note that all data can be useful, but it’s dangerous to lean too heavily on any one point.
“I use a medical analogy. There are some key metrics I look at as the ‘vital signs’ of a sales campaign. You might triage that campaign differently depending on what the vitals tell you, but it’s important not to focus too heavily on any one metric. It’s easy to focus on too high a level of a KPI and not understand the context of it. You could say, ‘Wow, we’ve got a great connect rate.’ But if you don’t drill in to determine if those connects are gatekeepers or the right people to talk to, that connect rate doesn’t mean anything.”
-Matt Jordan, (Insert Job Title) at Allied Revenue
Here are some of the key metrics that we use to guide our campaigns at Allied:
1) Rep productivity
How many calls and connections are your reps making? The more chances your reps have to connect with leads, the more sales they’ll close. But if your rep productivity is down, don’t rush to blame them for not hitting their targets. First, think about removing the obstacles preventing them from hitting their targets. Consider outsourcing your lead research or hiring someone in-house to generate and qualify leads so your reps can focus on hitting their targets without distraction.
2) Connection rate
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, the connection rate measures the number of calls your reps make that someone answers as a percentage of the total number of calls they make.
As mentioned above, the connect rate is an excellent metric on paper, but you need to dig into the data your reps produce to see if you’re connecting with the right people. Just because your reps connected with a high percentage of people they dialed doesn’t mean they connected with the decision-makers you’re targeting.
3) Phone engagement
Once your reps have connected with someone, how long are they on the phone? Are they holding the attention of the people they’re trying to contact? If the phone engagement time is low, can you change anything to help your reps be more successful? Think about re-writing your sales script and ensuring the value you’re offering is unmistakable.
4) Email open rates
How many emails that you’ve sent are being opened? How many people are replying to the emails being opened?
Open rates are very deceptive and unreliable when measuring a campaign’s success. Just because your emails are being opened doesn’t mean they’ve reached the right people. Someone trying to zero their inbox could have opened and closed them without even looking. Or they could have been screened by a filter that counts the screening as an open.
5) Email click and reply rates
Click-through rate (CTR) and reply rate are much better predictors of email performance than open rates. Click-through rates indicate general interest, but if you’re seeing high reply rates, you’re likely sending to the right people.
Iterative Testing and Optimization
It can be tempting to abandon your campaign goals and start over when the data suggests that your current approach is not working. We’d encourage you not to.
Testing is a slow, scientific process. The whole point is to find what’s working and double down on it. If you burn your approach to the ground and start over, you’ll never know what worked in your original campaign!
“Don’t test too many variables all at once. If you test multiple variables in the same test, you won’t know which variable was important, so try to limit it to testing one variable at a time when you can. In email A/B testing, we test two with the same subject line and same body because if we do two different subject lines and two different bodies, we don’t know whether it was because of the subject line or the body that one was better than another.”
- Matt Jordan, Senior Director at Allied Revenue
Test one thing at a time and be patient. Building an effective campaign can take months. Every sales team is made up of human beings, and if you change everything on them every few days, you’re always adding a learning curve and killing your momentum.
Democratizing the process
When going over campaign data, it’s critical to share it with as many stakeholders as possible. Humans are flawed. One campaign stakeholder might be attached to a particular idea that isn’t reflected in the data but that they believe will change everything.
“There’s a required cognitive dissonance in analytics. Sometimes, you have all these best theories on how to connect with your market, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a much more reactive process. If a campaign is managed by somebody who can’t accept that their theories aren’t working out, it won’t add much value.”
- Ian Fitzgerald, founder of Allied Revenue
You’ve got to be open to trying new things and have the humility to admit that you were wrong.
Interested to learn more?
Growth is a continuous process in the sales world, and we’re here to grow with you.
Book a call with the Allied Revenue team to find out if we’re a fit for you!
