Analytics for sales teams by DataSelf (Tableau)

How to make your sales team's interactions with customers more educated, targeted, and efficient. You know, nowadays just relationships and pricing is no longer enough to have a good sales initiative. Clients are very educated. They already have checked for options. And the more educated your sales team is about the options in what the client situation is, the more effective they become. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today, analytics for sales teams. Thanks for joining us. My name is Johnny Girardi. I'm the founder and CEO of Data Self. So let's get started. What I'm going to be covering is pretty much the role of data or analytics for sales managers as well as for sales reps. We're going to have a Q and A session at the end and throughout the presentation, we're going to do four quick surveys so you can help us better do our webinars. Actually, I'm going to start with a quick survey, just trying to understand what applies to you by joining us here. So if you don't mind, please quickly choose one of these four options if you need better sales analysis tools, if you're a sales rep, if you're a sales manager, if you're upper management or and if your organization uses CRM. So choose all the options that apply to your business and be sure to apply the submit button. We have a lot of answers still coming, so please be sure to check and click the submit button. I'm going to close it in about 10 seconds. Okay, thank you. I'm going to close a poll and share the results. So most people joining are saying that they need better sales analysis and they're from upper management. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. So let's get started with the content. So the first thing I want to talk about is the role of of analytics for sales managers, people who are managing the sales team. One of the best books around lately about that purpose is Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan. He interviewed several large organizations trying to identify key metrics for effective sales management. And he found out that there are more than 300 key metrics that different organizations use for effective sales management. Now, one of the most interesting things he did, which is really enlightening, is he asked the question, can we manage this metric? I mean, if you're trying to manage your sales team and you're using all these metrics, can you really measure the metric? Well, what he found out from that standpoint, if you can manage the metric out of this 300 and something, there are three types of sales metrics. The first one is there are metrics that revolve around sales activities like calls, meetings and things like that. These metrics are used for managing so you can actually manage your team, how many calls you're making per week, how many meetings and so forth they can be. So these metrics are fully controlled by the sales managers. Now there are many metrics. There are sales objectives. Well, I want to increase the number of opportunities I need to reach my sales quota. These are the objectives. You cannot really control them. You can influence them. The more sales activities, the more opportunities you get, the more you're going to be meeting your quota. But it depends on other people. So you do not control it. You actually use these metrics for diagnosis of your systems and your procedures for planning. And again, you can influence, but it's not in your control because you depend on your clients and your prospects to engage with you. So those are sales objective metrics. And finally is the business results, how much you sold actually. Right. And this is pretty much metrics for reporting. You have no control because for people to give you money, you got to earn it and it's there, you know, it's at the discretion to do it or not. So it's not a controllable metric and it's pretty much determined by you doing the sales activities and having the sales objective and effectively achieving your sales objectives. But you have no control. Now the most interesting thing that Mr. Jordan found from this research is that in his research only 17% of the metrics were around sales activities. Most of the metrics were on sales objectives and some on the business results. So this kind of information, if you're managing teams, I highly recommend you to go to. This book is very informative, giving you insights of how you can do better, defining what metrics you should put in place to do a better sales management. Now let's take a look at some of the procedures, some processes and dashboards that can help you with the sales management process. I'm going to switch now to some of the Data Self dashboards. So one of the first things is that people come to us is they're trying to get a better management of the sales teams. And it's a process. You know, quite often people have poor reporting, they don't have metrics on top of the system. And with Data Self because it's so much easier and faster to see metrics, to understand them, people start to realize, okay, out of all of these metrics that I'm looking at, which ones are important to focus on and how can we get our sales team to use them effectively. And it's a discovery process. Sometimes you start with some metrics and eventually you realize you need to change to something else. This example I'm going to go through is from one of our clients that went through the process and found this very productive for them. So initially was, well, they put together this pipeline management report and the account manager, the sales manager, every week at the beginning of the week would take one of the account managers and focus only on that account manager would have a one on one with the person to analyze specifically the opportunities that this person has in the pipeline and decide and help the sales manager decide which ones he should be focusing on. And the reason is quite often the sales manager, the sales manager knows a lot about the business and can more quickly identify among the prospects which ones have a bigger chance of really succeeding or at least helping them move through the funnel. This kind of dashboard is very helpful for the sales manager as well as the sales rep. Let's say as a sales manager I come here, I see all the account the reps, I see how much the opportunities they have in their pipeline. I can filter this by looking at open opportunities, won losses and so forth. And at the bottom I have all the details of all opportunities. If I choose a specific rep like lean this case and I click on it now the dashboard will only show Lee information and show all the accounts and in detail. So when the account manager was sitting with Lee, let's say he could go over these opportunities and help Lee focus his effort on where the account manager or the sales manager would believe will be more beneficial for the organization. So this was an ongoing process at the beginning, every week there would be meeting to discuss what happened last week and what the salesperson should do the next week. And eventually as the process took shape and really momentum, the one on one meetings were almost no longer required because the sales team now knew what they should do. Looking at this and using the tool, they would usually be able to look at things and decide what to do. And they would only check with the sales manager if they have questions about their opportunities. Another interesting dashboard that was helpful for management was looking at last contact. You know, how long it's been, how many weeks that the account manager has not been contacting the leads that are in the pipeline. So this show, you know, by account manager, zero to many weeks. And then how many opportunities have been touched, let's say this week or it's been one week, we haven't touched in the color of each one of these quadrant or these little cells represent how much improbable sales we have in those opportunities together. And again, by clicking here, the sales manager would be able to focus specifically on one account manager and specifically look at the opportunities behind it to help again the sales reps to do their jobs better. Other things also use can be like sales funnel. Again you know, looking at sales funnel for all reps and then you choose let's say Lee, then you go there and now you're focusing your sales funnel only in Lee, checking how the funnel looks like the breakdown of opportunities by the stage and all the details. So these are some examples of how sales management dashboards can help. And again, it's a discovery process. One of the good news is if you take a solution like Dataself where you have a lot of out of the box dashboards as a starting point, you can start discussing which ones will be beneficial for your business. Experiment them with your team or create new ones and start figuring out exactly for your sales processes how you can make them more effective. Let me open a second poll now. So what are your reporting challenges? And if you don't mind entering, please, The option is difficult to use. I think there's no need to explain poor performance, slow reports, lack of access, anytime, anywhere, meaning maybe you need access via mobile devices. If you have data silos, you know, do you have information coming from different systems and you want to sit together with your sales reports. Not contextual mean sometimes you need the information but you just don't know where to find it. So the information is not coming to you in the flow of your process. So please be sure to vote and press the submit button. We're still getting some managers. 10 more seconds. Please make your choices and click submit. All right, I'm going to close the poll. Thank you very much. Sharing the results. So about the same number of people chose difficult to use, lack of data silos and not contextual. Okay, thank you very much. Let's move along. Now what about of role of analytics of data for sales reps? Hmm, interesting. First of all, sales reps are the guys actually selling. Quite often their needs are different than the sales managers. And what are the characteristics of great sales reps? Well, they are competitive, they really do better than the others, right? They're number driven, they want to sell more, they want to get more commission and they're curious, they want to see what more they can learn that can help them close things more quickly. If your sales reps don't have these traits, probably you should find Others because you really need to have a sales team that has these three traits. Now what is really important for a rep? What's motivating from a data standpoint? What can you do that is important for them and to motivate them to do better? Better? Well, typically is building dashboards and information that will, you know, that will kick into their main traits. You know, they're competitive, they're numbers driven and they're curious. So typically one of the important dashboards that you should provide them with. And again, this is an example from the same company I was talking before that really worked well for them is let's say show a quota dashboard where you show the, the whole company metrics, the whole thing by region and then by individuals. And then you put no colors. If your bar is green, it means it met the quota, so you're good. If it's below the quota, then it is like, you know, is in the red, orange or yellow areas. So let's say if I were Betty in this example and I'm way behind Barbara and I'm a competitive sales rep, I'm going to say what is she doing that I'm not? You know, that I'm not, you know, can I learn from the people that are doing really well to try to improve my processes? Of course you have to look at, you know, privacy information. So be sure to build a dashboard that you can share things with other people. They're not privacy topics. And if you can share some of the things that will kick your reps curiosity to learn from others and try to be better. So this example, I say, okay, Betty is not doing so well. So she can maybe go to another dashboard where she can see information from other reps like Barbara. And then you can see, oh, look at this, Barbara is calling a lot than I call him per week. And she's emailing and doing a lot of activities, sales activities, way more than me. So maybe that's a tip. Maybe I have to up my game and call more people and maybe see which ones are more effective. So again put information from other people that are not proprietary, that are private, but that can help each individual rep to see what they can do more to be more effective. Let me show some other examples of dashboards here that per reps also prove to be valuable. So suppose Betty, she figures that she needs to call more people. Who is she going to call? Just open the contact list and call one by one? Well, maybe, but maybe in your business there are different ways to find which prospects are hotter. So building Dashboards that can define who's hot is a tool that can help the sales manager figure that out by themselves. The sales rep figured it out by themselves. Again, sales managers should influence the process and help them decide who to call. But the tools should also give them information so they can choose who to call. This is one example of a who's hot dashboard. Here you would have the companies in your pipeline and then the bars are the number of type of contacts that this company has been doing with your business. In this example, we're pulling the client was pulling website hits, email contacts and calls. And then suppose I'm Barry again and I come here and suppose I know that this time of the day, right now 9:00am It's a great time to call let's say Texas and a few states here. So I pick and choose those states and right now the list at the top tells me which of these companies who is hot in those states. And now I can choose. Let's say, hey, I'm going to call Frederick and see what's going on. So now before I call Frederick, I go to my customer Trends and I choose Fredex here. So I choose Freddick. And then what I can see is, hey, look at this. Freddick, you know, is a good client. You know, we're doing business, it's been profitable. This is my sales trend for the past two years on a monthly basis. Business is growing and 2015 is bigger than 2014. So, you know, wow. I mean, definitely Frederic has been a good client. So I'm giving context to me before I call Frederic so I know what to talk with them, not just being, hey, how are you doing? Do you need anything? No. Give them information so they're educated about the client's trends. So when they talk with the client, they can help the client more quickly decide what to order. And then you can add to this kind of report many pieces of information for this company. For instance, they had product lines and you know, we're in April, so they put a report showing what the client has ordered this April, in what order? Last years April, side by side. So look at this. Hey, Diary. They're buying almost zero. I mean, almost nothing in Diary, what's going on? So when I'm calling Frederic, I'm going to let the person talk about what they're looking for and whatnot. They want to say, hey, why are you not ordering so much? Diary, is there something wrong with our product? Is the competition knocking on pricing? Contextual, educated, targeted is a conversation that makes very effective in the Client, in this case Fredex, is going to appreciate that you as a sales rep, you know them and you know their business. So it's a big difference than just calling, being friendly. Hi, how are you doing? You know what's going on. You're targeted, you're educated and you're helpful. Now let me choose another example here. If I go and you know, I finished my call with Frederic and then Mason called me and then I pick up the phone, hey, how are you doing? Then, oh, well, I need the context from Mason, so I know what he's asking me and I want to be sure I'm also in the context. So as Mason is saying, how are you doing? Whatnot. The person started asking me questions and whatnot. And then I start looking at the trends here and again I see what's going on and I see that they are not so profitable. I mean, I'm losing money with, I mean for my quota, I'm losing profitability with this client. I click on the profitability as I'm talking with this person and I can see which products are being unprofitable. I mean, again, if you make these dashboards contextual to what the salesperson is doing, they will be so much more educated about what the client needs are and what their trends are. So you can help them decide what to do. But also you're going to be contextual to your own business's main needs. So this profitability is something that is important for you. You can provide information like this. So as you are negotiating with the client and whatnot, you have more information, your fingertips to decide which way you should go. So these are some of the examples of dashboards that can help sales reps to be more targeted, educated and efficient. From a contextual standpoint, typically the more you put information in their processes, the better if they use an ERP system, if they use a CRM system. So the idea is to insert these reports and dashboards in their hygiene applications to find that information. The example that I'm showing here is with Salesforce, but it also works with pretty much any CRM where these data self dashboards can be embedded into the application. So as they go to their accounts, their contacts and whatnot, the reports will be there already contextual. So let's say if I go to the Frederick account and I open the page, it could show right there in the contact information what they have been buying, their trends and whatnot. So being contextual really helps the salespeople be, you know, finding the information quickly and be more Educated, doing their jobs. All right, let's open one more poll here. So what are your reporting tools? Please choose all the options applicable and submit and click Submit. Still getting answers. Please be sure to click the submit button at the end. 10 more seconds. All right, thank you. I'm going to close the poll and share the results. So most people are using the reporting tools provided by the ERP and CRM vendor, Excel, Crystal and others. Thank you very much. Let's move along. So what about Data self Analytics? Well, I'm the company founder and CEO and when I started this business 10 years ago, the main vision was well in the mid market companies using Sage, Microsoft, Salesforce and whatnot products. They have critical reporting needs but the tools available are usually not the greatest. They're kind of complicated, time consuming, very IT driven. So the vision that we have when we started the business was well, let's find the Fortune 2000 world tools that are really easy to use. Let's make them more affordable, let's make them work for mid sized companies. So what we do in a nutshell is that's it. It's pretty much the best of the breed made to work for you. That's it. That's what we do. We take Fortune 2000 technology, we make it affordable, we make it easy for you. Our current solution includes Tableau and SQL Server, which was some of the most reputable BI technologies available for 2000. We add our own technology to make it simpler and faster to deploy and to maintain these other tools. And for the past 16 years we have learned how people have been using our tool and we have been kind of crowdsourcing reports and, and today out of the box we have more than 5,000 reports. Dashboard, KPIs out of the box. So let me talk a little bit about why we chose Tableau and Microsoft. Gartner is one of the most reputable companies doing technology assessment for Fortune 2000. And for the past several years they have rewarded Tableau and Microsoft as leaders in the upper market BI framework. So what we're bringing to you, as I said, is nothing but the very best from Portugal 2000. We're making simple. We make it work for you and it does not break the bank from an architecture standpoint. We pull the data from your data sources, you know, your erp, your CRM, Google Analytics and whatnot. We bring you to a data warehouse using SQL Server platform. We use our own technology to eliminate programming and then at the end of the day people will be consuming reports using the Tableau analytics platform. Which is really impressive, easy to use, fast, and you can access your reports and dashboards anytime, anywhere, using desktop, web and mobile devices. And again with a lot of reports as a starting point. Now, why do we use Tableau? Many people are not aware of Tableau. Well, many other analytics platforms, they were designed by engineers, by geeks making flashy things. Tableau is kind of the exception. When they're building their analytics platform, they use psychologists and graphic designers to help business people understand. The data visually is very different from most of the other BI players. So let me talk a little bit more about them. Look at this. What should you do? That's kind of the idea behind Tableau. If you see this, you don't have to think, you just jump, get the hell out of here. If we don't have this kind of visual cue to tell something right off the bat, maybe we have not survived as a species, but we have. Well, this is a little extreme example, but what Tableau does really well with data is. Let me show some examples. If I ask you how many nines we have here, if you are like most of us, it's going to take a while to count. You're going to get it, but it's going to take you several minutes. Going to be time consuming, boring. What Tableau does is this. It's a very simple change. Now the nines are in bold and red and in a few seconds you can tell there's about 10. Awesome. Move on to the next part of your decision making process. Rows and columns. Well, rows and columns is very popular. It's awesome to do a lot of analysis. But when you try to do trend analysis, rows and columns are not so efficient because it takes a long time to figure things. Which territories have the biggest sales, what is the biggest lopa stability? Again, unless you're gifted, it's going to take a while to interpret the numbers. With Tableau, we have, for instance, this. Now, the longer bars are bigger sales. I can tell quickly that Central has the bigger sales. And I can quickly tell which items have low profitability. I mean, in a few seconds I can see the main trends to make decisions. Rows are important. Rows and columns are important. But trend analysis can also be important to make the decision making process more intuitive and faster. Now when I mention about psychologists and graphic designers, I'm talking about also not about being fluffy, being flashy, it's about being sightful. You're in a business, you're making money, you need to be efficient. So for instance, 3D pie charts, they look beautiful. They do, but they are deceiving. Is it bigger? The red or the blue slices? It's kind of hard to tell. Tableau makes it hard. I mean, it's very hard to build 3D pie charts in tableau because they're deceiving. In tableau, when you look at pie charts, what you have is 2D because the important thing is being beautiful. Yes. But most importantly, being insightful. And they excel at doing that. All right, so let me show you now a little bit of some ad hoc examples of looking at data, sales data. The examples that I showed you before would be usually built and embedded into the sales managers and sales reps tools and procedures. Right. But sometimes you may have different questions. You need to slice and dice the data. Maybe you are in a situation where the client asks a question and you know the answer. You have to find a new report, you have to build a new report from scratch. So I want to show some ad hoc examples now in data Self and also how people can consume the information. So now I'm switching to the desktop application, DataSoft Desktop. And suppose, you know, I'm. Suppose I need to see a report showing my sales this month and I want to see all the details, the invoices, the customers, the products and whatnot. So it's pretty much drag and drop. I come here and hey, I want to see sales again this month by customer so I can bring the customer to my report. I just drag and drop customer to my report. These are all my customers. I want to see sales. So I drag and drop sales to my report. So total sales by customer. Well, I want to see this month, so I'm going to drag and drop my invoice date to my columns. And right now I see sales by year. I expand from year to quarter. I can expand from quarter to month. So I have all my company history here. It's a lot of data. I just want to see this month. Well, I can just slice, do a filter. I'm going to take invoice, date and drag and drop into my filters. I'm going to choose relative date and choose this month. That's it. Very simply. Now I have the report showing sales by customer this month. And if later, I want to kind of change the filter and look at prior month or maybe the last four months or change the time bucket. It's a breeze. It's very straightforward. Well, but I also want to see products sold, invoice number and whatnot. It's all drag and drop. If you want to see product here, it Is I'm going to drag and drop right here my products. So buy customer by product sales. I want to see invoice number. No problem, just pick and choose. Many of our clients learned how to do reports like this just by watching a video like this. It's pretty straightforward. I want to see profitability, no problem, drag and drop. So building reports from scratch like this is very straightforward. And you can use desktop, web and mobile devices to build these reports on the fly, anytime, anywhere. So again this kind of example is to tell people, well I don't have the information in a report already, but I want to be self sufficient, I want to find it by myself. Well if you go through training and sometimes it takes very little training, you can learn how to do these changes and become more self sufficient. What if I want to see some trend analysis? Well we can bring with new report and let's say I want to see my sales by month. Well so let's add sales to my report and let's add the dates and I want to see this by month. So right now I'm seeing sales by month in my whole company history. Well, what if I want to associate with my website visitors? How can I do that? Well, if you don't have a solution with a data warehouse, you almost cannot do that with dataself. We can connect let's say to your revenues connector information from related information from other data silos. In this example we have added website visitors which come from Google Analytics. It was an IT work, it took some time, but once we merged the information in the data warehouse automatically every day is refreshed or whatever the time period to refresh is. And as a business person, as a salesperson, I don't need to care about the back end. I just need to learn how to drag and drop. So if I put my website visitors in my report, so now these are website visitors and let's make them bars so I can easily tell them apart from my sales which is a line and maybe you can even put on a dual axis. And now I see my bars which are the website visitors and my sales and I can analyze if my website campaigns are happy with my sales. Again this kind of ad hoc analysis capabilities that you can do using this kind of technology. My last example of ad hoc is geographical analysis. Well what if I want to see sales by state, how big my deals are, everything on a map. So I just pick those three fields and I tell the tool, show me on a map and there it is. Let make the bubbles a little bigger, bigger Bubbles, bigger sales and the bubbles are sliced by the size of the deals. Awesome. And finally, hey, these three dashboards, I want these views in a dashboard to put on my iPad. Well now I build a dashboard and I just tell the tool, well, I want to put my map at the top, my trend analysis at the bottom and my detail report on the right. All drag and drop. Again, you do not need to be a consultant, an IT person to be able to do these things. And now once you're here, this dashboard can be sent to the web server you can access using mobile devices and whatnot and it becomes very easy to touch it and get the data. Let's say what if I want to see information from California and Texas? When I do that, my report changes and it shows my trend analysis in those two states in all the details right here. So very easy. Let me also show some of these also dashboards we have available out of the box that can be contextual for sales reps. Let me show you this one which is pretty, I think, informative. This kind of report is available out of the box and it shows the top customers by sales changed since last year to date. So these customers are growing the most in sales and this is the sales growth and these are declined the most in sales since last year to date. Now do you need to look at this report every day? No, it's not going to change every day, but maybe every month you want to receive this report and you want to be sure you're keeping track of these customers who are declining the most because hey, maybe something is wrong. So what you can do is you just tell the tool, you can subscribe and tell send me this report to my email inbox automatically at the end of the month. So at least once a month or every week or whatever the time period is, you can check some of these trends. Some trends you need to look every day, some every week, maybe some every month and some every quarter. And you can kind of choose the subscription option to make it self service. You don't have to go to the tool, you don't have to remember the tool will send you these trends on an email. And then once you open and you see the information, if you want to do more analysis and drill down, you can click on it and go right into the webpage and do more analytics. Alrighty, let's move along with our presentation. So what are the main benefits of data self? So first of all, the most important is empowering the decision makers, empowering the sales team so they become more self Sufficient, they can get their data anytime, anywhere in the context. And the way we do that is by using a data warehousing and analytics platform that is powered by the leaders in the Gardner magic quadrant. So what you get from us is pretty much the best of the breed technology. Plus, we provide more than 5,000 reports out of the box, so you don't start with a clean page of bi, but a lot of reports that we have learned that are valuable for many other businesses. The second is with our technology, we're going to cut dramatically the time that it takes to get to your insights. So we shrink the time to get to the insights. You can analyze the data. We have more time to analyze the data, decide and act on. So shrink the time to get to the data so you have more time for the other things. The way we do that is because the tool is much easier to build and modify reports. We can automate repetitive data manipulation procedures so you don't have to use Excel copy and paste. And we can also automatically distribute reports on different schedules Already. Let's make our final poll. We'd like to hear from you. How was this webinar? So please choose all the options and please click Submit. Please be sure remember to click the submit button. 10 more seconds. All right, thank you very much. Let me share the results. So thank you. Everyone found it informative. Many people found that you met expectations and some want to be contacted. Thank you very much. All right, let's move to the questions and answers section in the GoToWebinar panel. There is a chatting box. So if you can click your questions and I'm going to be answering them right now. Let me check if I have any questions already. Yep. I have a question here from Tim. What ERP products are supported by Dataself? Tim, thanks for your question. It's a good one. Let me go here and go to my website and if you come to the website and scroll down, you're going to find. Analytics by erp and CRM. So if you click on this button, You come to this page where it will list the ERP and CRMs we connect out of the box and then if you click on one of them, you get more information about how the system works. Tim, thank you for your question. Let's see other questions. Question from Dave. How do I get trained on your product? Dave, thanks for your question. So, training, when we sell the solution, you can buy or you can subscribe to the solution. We always include training hours and typically the training is from one to three hours. As a starting point on the client tool. And many people find that the beginning of these few hours is enough for them to become self sufficient. Because there's also hours and hours of online videos available for self training. If you come to our resource page and go to the training videos, there are a few hours of training which we consider like no introductory, that complement the live training. And then also on the tableau website there are several dozen hours of training that can also help you become self sufficient. So training. Usually it takes only a few hours of live instructor led training that we do. Many companies, they just take it off from there. In other companies they ask us to do a lot more training. Now like myself, I never been through training with the tableau tool. I just learned it by myself from scratch. And actually many of our clients, many of the users from our clients, many of them also learn the tool without actually going through formal training. The point is the tool is really easy to use and it doesn't take a lot of time for people to become more self sufficient. Folks, we have more questions. Unfortunately we're running out of time. We will be answering the questions by email. So I appreciate that. Let me put here my contact information, my cell phone, my email and my Twitter account. I hope you found this session informative. We're going to record the session and then at the end we're going to be sending you an email that provides you the link to the recording session and feel free to share with other people. Folks, I hope you have a great Thursday. Thank you for joining us and have a great day. It.