Accurate Data is Key to Increasing Sales Performance Metrics
Did you know that poor quality data is costing your sales team at least 30 percent of revenues?
Allow me to illustrate. My inside sales manager once showed me a former Tyson Group employee’s LinkedIn profile, in which he claimed he won Rookie of the Year at my company. Trouble is, we don’t have a Rookie of the Year award. I sent him a note apologizing for missing the ceremony with a P.S. explaining that he might want to represent himself accurately.
I don’t tell these stories to embarrass anyone, just to illustrate that there’s plenty of bad data out there, even on LinkedIn. Inaccuracies, including the faulty information salespeople glean when they rely on the same online sources, ramp up the pressure on salespeople. That means a salesperson has to be asking the right questions at the right time in a live conversation or through research. Salespeople must take time throughout the sales process to take the temperature of prospects.
We surveyed salespeople in sixty-seven training engagements between 2017 to 2018 and found that 40 percent of sales teams feel they do not have the right information before making a sales call. Clean, accurate data makes all the difference for high performing sales teams seeking to streamline and clarify the front end of the sales cycle. Our studies show that sales reps are spending at least 32 percent of their time searching for missing data, then manually entering it into their CRM. Quality data is all about working smarter, preserving your resources, and accelerating your team’s sales cycle.
The Devil may be in the details, but it’s in the data, too.
For additional ideas on powering the sales process and building a high performance sales team, get your copy of Selling is an Away Game, available online at Amazon.
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