In today’s data-driven world, visibility of sales performance data is crucial for revenue leaders to make informed decisions and accelerate revenue growth. Data visibility is no longer a nice-to-have for revenue leaders. Inaccessible, unreliable, or incomplete data can create a dangerous situation where the blind lead the blind.
As the marketplace becomes increasingly competitive and buyer expectations continue to rise, sales leaders must have a clear understanding of their data to identify issues and optimize processes to create a successful revenue motion.
Once you have a sales engagement platform in place that delivers accurate data reporting and analytics, then what? Looking at the sales performance data is a positive step in the right direction, but how do you make sense of it all, and what do you need to pay the closest attention to?
Analytics are daunting, and we are here to help. Learn how to boost B2B sales performance with three top sales Flow metrics in this article.
Muti-Step Sales Flows
No sales leader wants to find out at EOQ which of their sales reps weren’t hitting their numbers. Instead, effective leaders rely on a sales engagement platform to surface data insights so they can identify challenges in real-time, right the ship, and get back on course to hit their number.
Establishing an online collaborative space creates open lines of communication between reps and their managers, increasing the likelihood of solving an issue — like catching a slipping deal or untouched account — before it becomes a larger problem.
Sales engagement platforms feature Flows, or multi-channel messaging campaigns, that allow you to engage personally with your customers at scale (also referred to as sequences or cadences). One of the benefits of using a sales engagement platform is that it allows you to dig into the metrics of your team’s sales outreach, so you can see what’s working and what isn’t, create best practices, and coach your team to revenue success.
By looking at the right metrics, sales leaders can easily understand which sales cadences are performing best, optimize underperforming messaging, see which days get the best response rates, and more.
The Top Three Flow Metrics for Boosting Sales Performance
While sales engagement platforms like Groove can show many different analytics and data points, it’s important to know where to focus your attention so you can empower your team with insights that can make an impact. Below are the three most important sales Flow metrics for coaching your team to success.
1. Identify the most effective Flows
Data is the antidote to “spraying and praying” your engagement strategy. For example, in Groove’s Flow Analytics “Top Performances” chart below, you can see what messaging is actually resonating with your customers and prospects.
This performance chart gives you and your team valuable insight into which Flows are booking the most meetings, have the highest conversion rates, positive conversations, and more. You can also evaluate how standardized templates or personalized messaging affects conversation rates, so you can dig deeper into where to optimize your customer and prospect engagements.
"Once you figure out what is working and what isn’t, you can focus your efforts on messaging that is proven to succeed and then optimize your sales playbook accordingly. Being able to see which AEs are actually using and personalizing their Flows is a great predictor of who will hit their number at the end of the year, and who is falling behind and in need of more coaching."
- Margaret McCarthy, Commercial Sales Manager, Groove
2. Understand if sellers are taking the right Flow actions
You can build a sales playbook, but unless your team follows it, it’s just a bunch of words on paper – or on a Google Slide. If you are tired of not knowing if your sellers are actually following your strategy, we hear you.
As a revenue leader, you need granular insight into the performance of each Flow step to see if sellers are actually doing the right things at the right time. This data enables you to see which sellers are following your playbook, using the correct Flows, completing steps and actions at the right times, personalizing their outbound, and more.
Groove provides this data as part of Groove Outcomes. In the screenshot below, you can see how revenue leaders can use data to hold sellers accountable for their work, as well as reward reps with the most consistent and successful execution of their Flow steps.
3. Visualize how contacts move through Flows
Using a visualization tool like Groove’s “Sankey Chart,” helps teams visualize how contacts move through Flows, so you can identify opportunities (and gaps) and take swift action.
With this chart, you can see the progression of people moving through a Flow, where users are skipping steps or exiting, and figure out the exact moment when successes are happening (meetings booked, positive conversations, or opportunities created with contact).
Visualizing the movement of contacts through Flows allows you to finally diagnose bottlenecks and understand how the funnel progresses. No more guessing which steps are converting or where the dropoff is happening in your sales playbook; now you can drill into the successes or losses, run A/B tests, and get all of your sellers working together as a well-oiled machine.
"If you start to see a lot of people exit a Flow before they’ve completed it, you can run additional A/B testing to see what will keep prospects dripping through. Also, if points of successes are happening further down in the flow, you can rework the messaging to get those successes earlier."
- Dani Morio, Sales Development Manager, Groove
The Bottom Line on Improving Sales Performance for Your Flows
Sales has always been an art, but with better access to data, it can be more of a science. If the bane of your work as a revenue leader is understanding how well your communication strategies are working, you need a reliable way to demystify the data and get insight into what’s going on.
By diving into the analytics of your sales Flows, revenue leaders can identify which messages are resonating and which strategies are driving the most conversions to make data-driven decisions for optimizing their revenue engine.
The development of new, innovative technology like Groove Outcomes now takes the guesswork of sales. Groove Outcomes is designed to give revenue leaders and their teams deep insight into the performance of their Flows, so they can optimize around what’s working and improve their effectiveness over time.
With granular insight into Flow messaging – revenue teams can easily understand which Flows, steps, and users are generating the most engagement, positive conversations, and opportunities.
Groove Outcomes provides the dashboards, metrics, and data visualization needed to assess the performance of sales Flows with granularity:
- Understand what messaging is working
- Identify high-performing Flow steps
- Gauge user activity and identify low usage
- Compare Flow messaging strategies for effectiveness to find the best approach and timing
- Make sure you are capturing all the data that matters at scale (i.e. data from Standard AND Custom Objects)
- Visualize the progression of leads and contacts through Flows to identify opportunities (and gaps) and take action
Whether you call them Flows, cadences, or sequences, you want to make sure you have the data needed to optimize every step.
Learn more about how you can get deep insight into the sales performance of your Flows with Groove Outcomes. Request a demo today!