September 1, 2020
Sales meetings: those early morning gatherings dreaded by both managers and reps.
Managers will spend hours compiling data, lobbing together spreadsheets, and searching for insights among the spreadsheets to help drive the metrics they need. Or, they may try to use the dashboards that come with their CRM, only to find that those lack specificity and can’t be easily adapted to answer core business questions.
Account managers and reps often fare about the same and can leave large group meetings or even one-on-one sessions without the specific data they need to make decisions about which prospects to pursue.
But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if both leadership and individual contributors could go into a sales meeting with an interactive, easy-to-use tool that would show exactly which opportunities exhibited the most growth potential? What if this tool also created the opportunity for smarter and more targeted training and coaching, which are crucial to any rep's success?
Enter the Salos Services Sales Opportunity Matrix.
The interactive chart you see above is an example of what we build for our clients to help them run more effective and productive sales meetings and operations. This scatter plot visualizes the relationship between how much a particular customer has spent year to date, year over year, and in the past four weeks.
The goal is to move all customers to the upper right-hand quadrant of the matrix, showing that sales are increasing both annually and weekly. The other three quadrants show growth opportunities.
Each dot also represents a few key characteristics, including:
With this data visualization, sales managers and account reps can have incredibly productive and constructive conversations about revenue, opportunities, and goals.
For example, at first look, it appears that many of Iron Man’s clients are settled in the upper-right quadrant. For the handful of clients in the low year-over-year but high four-week revenue quadrant, Iron Man can continue to nurture those relationships and proactively examine what changes might have caused a change in buying behavior. Iron Man could click on each of the circles and get a further in-depth analysis of each customer’s top ordered items to see if there are opportunities there as well.
Iron Man’s sales manager could also use this tool in a coaching capacity and walk through each customer’s behaviors to evaluate the next best steps. For example, maybe there's an opportunity to walk through common objections Iron Man is hearing from his clients. By using the Salos Services Sales Opportunity Matrix, both Iron Man and his manager will have the data from which to launch a productive conversation and coaching session.
In each of those scenarios, both Iron Man and his supervisor would be using data to answer critical business questions.
Ultimately, dashboards and visualizations such as this one provide answers to many vital questions that most sales teams have, including:
Unlike spreadsheets and other tools that require manual input and analysis, business intelligence pulls data from many sources to a central place of truth. Information can come automatically from your CRM, your POS, or many other available sources. Then, your BI partner can use that data to create custom visualizations, such as the one you see above, to help answer the most common questions your salesforce faces. This data-first approach results can improve performance and morale for every member of your sales team. Can a spreadsheet do that for you?
