Understanding Sales Cycles Through Data

I met a sales team that tracks 27 different metrics. But none of them matter. They measure: - Calls made - Emails sent - Meetings booked - Demos delivered - Talk-to-listen ratio - Response time - Pipeline coverage But they all miss the most important number: How often prospects share your content with others. This hit me yesterday. We analyzed our last 200 deals: Won deals: Champion shared content with 5+ stakeholders Lost deals: Champion shared with fewer than 2 people It wasn't about our: - Product demos - Discovery questions - Pricing strategy - Negotiation skills It was about whether our champion could effectively sell for us. Think about your current pipeline: Do you know how many people have seen your proposal? Do you know which slides your champion shared internally? Do you know who viewed your pricing? Most sales leaders have no idea. They're optimizing metrics that don't drive decisions. Look at your CRM right now. I bet it tracks: ✅ When YOU last emailed a prospect ❌ When THEY last shared your content ✅ How many calls YOU made ❌ How many stakeholders viewed your materials ✅ When YOU sent a proposal ❌ How much time they spent reviewing it We've built dashboards to measure everything except what actually matters. The real sales metric that predicts closed deals: Internal Sharing Velocity (ISV) How quickly and widely your champion distributes your content to other stakeholders. High ISV = Deals close Low ISV = Deals stall We completely rebuilt our sales process around this insight: - Redesigned all content to be shareable, not just readable - Created spaces where champions could easily distribute information - Built analytics to measure exactly who engaged with what - Trained reps to optimize for sharing, not for responses Result? Win rates up 35%. Sales cycles shortened by 42%. Forecasting accuracy improved by 60%. Stop obsessing over your activity metrics. Start measuring how effectively your champions sell for you. If your CRM can't tell you how often your content is shared internally, you're operating in the dark. And that's why your forecasts are always wrong. Your move.

Dive into funnel analytics—a critical tool for any sales team looking to boost their performance and close more deals. Understanding your customer's journey through the sales funnel isn't just useful; it's a strategic necessity. 🎯 What is Funnel Analytics? Funnel analytics involves a detailed examination of each step a customer takes from initial contact to final sale. This method helps you understand and optimize every phase of the customer’s journey, ensuring no opportunity slips through the cracks. 🛠️ Addressing Sales Pain Points: Navigating the sales funnel can be complex, with potential customers dropping off at various stages. By leveraging funnel analytics, you can: Identify where you lose the most prospects. Assess the impact of your engagement strategies. Pinpoint unclear steps that prevent prospects from moving forward. Addressing these issues allows you to refine your approach, ensuring a smoother, more efficient funnel that maximizes conversions and boosts your sales revenue. 📊 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): To measure the effectiveness of your sales funnel, consider these crucial KPIs: Conversion Rate: The percentage of prospects who move to the next stage of the funnel. Time to Convert: The duration it takes for a prospect to progress from the first touchpoint to a closed deal. Drop-off Rate: The percentage of prospects who exit the funnel at each stage. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The overall cost of acquiring a new customer. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): The total revenue a customer is expected to generate during their relationship with your company. 🌟 Why It's a Game-Changer: Imagine you’re managing sales in a high-end B2B software company. By analyzing your sales funnel, you discover that a significant number of prospects drop off at the demo stage. Perhaps the demo fails to address key concerns, or it’s too generic. With this insight, you can customize your demos to better meet the needs of your prospects, drastically improving conversion rates and demonstrating the power of precise, data-driven adjustments. 💥 Conclusion: Funnel analytics goes beyond mere data collection—it's about making that data actionable. By translating insights into strategic actions, you can dramatically enhance your sales processes and drive substantial business growth. Don't miss out on the opportunity to refine your sales strategy and achieve better results. #SalesStrategy #FunnelAnalytics #DataDrivenSales #SalesManagement

Every frontline seller should set up two reports that they look at every month 1. Average age in each stage - forget your “sales cycle” you need to break it down to see where you can speed it up at each stage 2. Conversion rate from stage to stage - forget your close rate, it’s about can I get 8% getting people from step 2 to step 3 Anecdotally…you might have an idea but it’s tough to feel a 5% gap or 3-4 days here or there Everyone loves to focus on the activity or pipeline metrics but if you want to actually close more deals….you need to know these numbers inside and out If you aren’t looking at this, now is the time and see how you stack up to your peers as well. This data is eye opening when we show leaders it for the first time as they think they are tracking what they should when they say “we have a 60 day sales cycle” When you zoom into that nice, straight line showing the average sales cycle across the team month over month….you will see it looks less like a straight line and more like a lie detector test at the rep level😆 Track this Review it regularly Get 5% better in the first month

"The math isn't mathing"...a common phrase I use when reviewing sales data. I posted a few days ago that Key Performance Indicators are the INDICATORS not the performance. This is because too many leaders manage the KPI and not the actual results. This post brought up the topic of whether to measure KPIs at all. Short answer: yes...but let's go deeper here. Let's break down the KPI Sales Cycle Length: The sales cycle length is a common KPI used to predict time to revenue. This KPI is best reviewed in the following structures: - Overall Average: Let's you know how long deals typically take - Range: Your shortest and longest sales cycles - Time by Stage: Which stage of a deal takes the longest - Time by Rep: which reps have the shortest vs the longest individually Now, measuring these isn't enough. You need to take these indicators and analyze them. Think like a seismologist. They need to interpret the data coming from the seismographs (their indicator data) to predict an earthquake. So let's say hypothetically you observe your sales cycles getting longer... Let's say the last stage of your sales process is growing in length across the organization. You are likely to find deals getting stuck in buying processes: - getting through legal - getting through procurement - managing/engaging all decision-makers - getting budget allocation approved By knowing your team is struggling with buying process elements, you can deploy training to reduce this friction. Different example... Let's say you review the time-by-rep report and realize each rep's information is wildly different by stage. You likely have a sales process issue where the stages are too convoluted and each rep has an inconsistent definition of the stages. In example 2, you need to fix and train your sales process to gain CRM hygiene. You see, the KPIs are indicators used to diagnose problems early. They are the seismographs for sales. But the standalone metric won't tell you where the next earthquake will be. You need to analyze the data to pinpoint the problem. KPI's = indicators to diagnose a problem P.S. This is an advanced sales topic. You will not learn this from a single post. The goal here is to reframe how you view your KPIs. What are they teaching you about your sales organization?