Crush It With Attention

Don’t allow your future quota-crushers to languish in your CRM. Put in place activity timers that shine a light on any opportunity that passes one week in your sales pipeline with no activity. An effective practice is to create a chart pitting “Days at 10%” vs. “Days With No Activity”. Alert the team that opportunities lolling in the upper-right will be reallocated to other reps. Perhaps you can hand them to your fierce, hungry new reps who are slaving away in the sales prospecting mines.

Quality AND Quantity

A second check is to monitor each rep’s ability to convert 10% opportunities to a stage deeper in the sales pipeline. This metric helps separate inefficient prospectors from the pack, and chips away at reps who may be hiding behind a wall of fluffy pipeline building activity. Fortunately, it’s easier to course correct a rep who is a pumped, but inefficient, prospector. As we know, prospecting is a habit steeped in science, but closing deals is an art.

To combat orphaned 10% opportunities, focus on these 3 sales metrics:

1. Days Since Last Activity
2. # Days at 10%
3. % Conversion Rate of 10% Opportunities

Explore our suite of sales metrics in a live demo. Get Started.

The post 10% Is The Most Dangerous Stage in Your Sales Pipeline appeared first on GoodData.

Watch What I Do, Not What I Say

Begin by tracking their Activity Metric, that is, their cadence for fielding inbound leads, making outbound calls and sending prospecting emails.

• Inbound marketing leads: watch closely the Lead Response Time to see who is “on it” and who is letting valuable leads languish.
• Outbound calls and 1:1 emails: track the pace at which these are sent out. Make sure the pace is consistent without the peaks and valleys which may indicate a lack of focus and follow-up.

The Quality Side of the Equation

With lead pursuit and outbound prospecting on track, look to the quality of interactions to identify who needs help prospecting. To gauge this, track sales metrics like Contact Rate. That is, how many activities does it take to generate a single early-stage pipeline opportunity.

It’s helpful to provide new sales reps with activity quotas. This will help them track against a clear goal and alerts you when a new rep is going sideways. You can then step in to help them get more comfortable with the products they’re selling, fix whatever process issues may be holding them back, or otherwise address the issue.

We recommend keeping these four sales metrics in mind as you embark on a more data-driven approach for evaluating your new sales reps:

1. Contacts Per Week (calls, emails, inbound leads)
2. Lead Response time (for marketing leads)
3. Contact Rate (# calls to generate an opportunity)
4. Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion % (for marketing leads)

To see some interesting sales metrics in action, take a moment to review this interactive sales dashboard.

The post Sales Metrics That Forecast New Rep Performance appeared first on GoodData.

1. Pacing. This type of analysis helps you measure progress against goals. These goals can be based on historical data, industry benchmarks or user defined. The important thing to remember is that progress isn’t necessarily linear. For example, some organizations close 50 percent of their total bookings on the last day of the quarter. Others, plateau towards the end. You need a way of understanding how you’ve done historically (or how your competitors are doing) and measure your current progress against that. Pacing analysis gives you a big-picture overview of your trajectory and progress against goals.

2. Parts of whole reporting. This will help you understand the moving parts that are helping you reach your goals. If you’re on target for bookings for the quarter, you’ll be able to see which product lines, sales reps, campaigns or other assets are contributing most to that. If, on the other hand, you’re behind, you’ll be able to pinpoint the cause.

3. Scenario analysis. When faced with a big decision, it often makes sense to consider a worst-case scenario, a best-case scenario and the most likely scenario. This is what scenario analysis does for you. It projects possible future outcomes. You’ll get a view of how these outcomes might occur, for example, if your biggest client has a bad quarter, they might cut out your services to save money, or they might rely even more on you in order to focus on their core competencies. Most likely, they’ll have an okay quarter and nothing will change.

4. Cohort analysis. Also known as segmentation, this marketing-analysis technique lets you see how people engage with your content or product over time. Say you roll out different versions of your website, and you want to understand how much your millennial audience engaged with the new site versus the old one. Cohort analysis will tell you that. It’s the way to see different usage patterns and the evolution of usage over time.

5. Correlation. The classic question in this category: what’s the correlation between diapers and beer? The answer is that when a dad goes to the store to pick up diapers, often times he’ll pick up a six-pack. So diaper sales are positively correlated with beer sales. Correlation analysis can help you find these types of unexpected relationships.

Once you have these 5 business analysis techniques in your toolbox, you’ll be able to cover a lot of analytical ground—and have the information you need to make more informed decisions as a result.

Need help crafting your business analysis strategy? Contact Us.

The post 5 Kinds of Business Analysis Techniques Every Business User Should Know appeared first on GoodData.

To eliminate end-of-the-quarter surprises, here are 3 key sales analytics tips to help you deliver “intelligence” across your sales organization.

 Create a visual that allows you to see change  & progress for each stage in the pipeline.
To make an accurate prediction of how the quarter will end, you need to be able to see pipeline movement at a glance. All pipeline opportunities should be thoroughly analyzed to determine actions that may be required. Start by tracking changes in the pipeline over the period – this will show you where your dollars are going and what business was lost, won, reforecast or moved out to another quarter.

A good view into the current position highlights risks in your pipeline in time for you to course correct.

 Identify “Stuck” Deals.
Every organization has an ideal sales pace and velocity. Deals that follow this progression are more likely to close than deals that lose momentum or get stuck in stage. Where is there progress? How are “actuals” trending towards goals? What is the path to reaching goals? By looking closely at actual performance versus the goals, the sales organization thoroughly understands the scope of work that still needs to be completed.

Understanding the ideal velocity for a winning deal can help the sales organization identify which deals are off pace or which deals got off to a good start but got stuck in stage. Focus your efforts on these deals, as they are the ones that can save your quarter.

 Always know your current position.
You can’t manage what you can’t see, and access to the right information at the right time helps you make correct decisions. These decisions are crucial in determining priorities, optimizing sales leads and giving you insight into every sales opportunity. Use your comprehensive sales data to visually show how much business has closed, what deals are expected to close, what deals are at risk and if anything significant happened to effect the quarter. This means showing progress towards quarterly goals across all regions and products, and estimating where the quarter is going to finish.

In other words, what is the overall outlook for the quarter?

Ready to turn your opportunities into wins? Take a look at more “intelligent” sales analytics.

The post 3 Tips to Improve Sales Pipeline Performance appeared first on GoodData.

To avoid getting caught in the madness of the data sphere, take a look below to find out which marketing metrics deserve attention and which are safe to let go.

When you are feeling bogged down by the metrics and data, take a step back and try to determine which marketing metrics directly relate to your company’s bottom line. You want social media and marketing analytics that are tied to sales or revenue. If the marketing metric does not tell you much about sales and instead, provides a meaningless number that makes you feel good about the brand, it is safe to focus your attention elsewhere.

Don’t get caught up in the madness – preview more marketing metrics in action.

The post Marketing Metrics Overload: What Really Matters appeared first on GoodData.

Read our new eBook, The Art and Science of Data-driven Marketing and get the scoop on how yesterday’s marketing artists can become today’s marketing scientists.

Show Me the Big Data
In order for big marketing data to be truly valuable, marketers must become marketing ‘scientists’—not actual experts in science, but rather probers and testers, who not only capture and trace information, but who also organize it and pinpoint what data-based strategies truly work, when they work and with which audiences they work best. To prove their worth and keep their seats at the revenue table, CMOs need to be armed with data that’s both measurable and actionable.

It’s All in The Analysis Silly
Generally speaking, most marketers are in agreement that a lack of data isn’t the problem. Marketing information is relatively inexpensive to collect and store, and you’re probably already amassing huge quantities of it. But knowing how to best access, organize and then act on that data confounds and frightens some marketing leaders, because a poorly planned approach could mean the difference between success and failure. Data-driven marketing is the science of harnessing big marketing data and turning it into decision-making metrics.

Selling It Upstairs
You’ve got to show executives how data-driven marketing will help you contribute directly to the bottom line. You can align your argument with each stage of the classic marketing funnel. Show how you will drive traffic to the top of the funnel by using metrics to know more precisely which marketing programs perform best, thus enabling you to better allocate your finite budget. And of course monitoring metrics for website conversions, lead nurture, customer marketing and e-commerce conversions are readily available and can be mined for significant efficiency gains. Adding all the gains together along a realistic timeline is likely all the structure you’ll need for executive buy-in.

Time to make your marketing data-driven? Contact us to find out how.

The post The Art and Science of Data-Driven Marketing appeared first on GoodData.

Your primary marketing dashboard is typically presented weekly to executives, and viewed daily by your marketing team. Done right, it has the amazing ability to keep executives calm and your marketing team focused. Done wrong and you’re slogging through the weeds every week with your CEO, and every executive in the room is suddenly donning a bright orange “today I’m a marketer” cap. Nightmare.

Here are 7 strategies to help you craft an elegant, effective marketing dashboard:

#1 Map To Your Marketing Strategy
Every executive in the room should immediately recognize that the metrics on your marketing dashboard map directly back to your marketing strategy. If your marketing team has committed to support a specific share of sales, then focus on that, or a metric that’s a good near-term proxy for a sale, such as SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads).

#2 Save the Strategic Reports for Later
Make it clear that longer-term metrics will be covered on a quarterly basis. For example, total marketing spend per sale is a critical metric, but is best discussed on a quarterly basis.

#3 Tell Your Story, Backwards
CEOs and VPs of Sales have notoriously short attention spans, so cut to the chase. Tell them the conclusion of your story first, and then back it out and paint the broader “why” picture. This may mean presenting your marketing-supported sales (or SQL) chart first, then registrations, and then website visitors. Basically, just flip the classic marketing funnel upside down.

#4 Keep It Simple
Suppress the marketer’s urge to show everything. By keeping your marketing dashboard simple you’ll not only focus the conversation, but executives will quickly become familiar with the metrics, so you’ll spend less time explaining the charts and more time discussing trends, tactics and strategies.

#5 Forecasting Calms Mental Calculators
Rather than force everyone in the room to do the mental math to project numbers out to the end of the month, do it for them! Use a simple straight-line projection for the month and explain away any aberrations caused by holidays or blizzards. You can also use a more sophisticated forecast if, for example, you know inside sales won’t be done calling all leads generated in May until one week into June.

#6 Keep Tactical Metrics in the Back
You’ll definitely want to build a series of robust tactical marketing dashboards, but make sure these only make an occasional appearance. If you’re wheeling these out then something especially good or bad is happening.

#7 Have Your Story Ready
We’re all marketers so we think in stories. The same should be true for your marketing dashboard. Before you head into your executive briefing map out the path you’re going to lead them down, particularly if it’s clear you’ll have to jump off the weekly dashboard and into your tactical metrics. If you lead the way everyone will better enjoy the ride.

Ready to Create Your Own Marketing Dashboard? Contact Us To Get Started.

The post 7 Strategies For a Stellar Executive Marketing Dashboard appeared first on GoodData.

Now, big data promises to consolidate the CIO’s strategic position even further. With it, everyday business users can analyze massive amounts of social, mobile, financial, shopping and operational data. Processed and analyzed correctly, new data can deliver the insight managers need to make better business decisions. It’s the CIO’s role to facilitate that insight.

That means simply running the right systems and ensuring continuous performance is no longer enough. Instead, CIOs need to think strategically about how the technologies and products mesh with your business users’ process. Do the products empower or confuse? Do they open users to new ways to explore data, find answers and make smart decisions? If you don’t provide the right tools and options, you’ve squandered the big data promise of greater efficiency, more sales and improved marketing campaigns. Guess who business users will blame for the wrong tools and implementation?

On the other hand, if you provide the right big-data apps and platforms, your business colleagues will sing your praise for enabling them to turn data into insights they can act on. Think of it: A CIO as rock star. Here are three ways to make sure you deliver legendary impact.

1. Ask the right questions. First, assume that big data will help you find new sources of revenue and profit. But for that to happen, you need to identify the internal and external data that impact your business.

   So ask yourself: Where is the data you need? How do you get your hands on it? Which stakeholders do you have to convince to share it? What’s the best way to distribute the right data to the right department?

2. Set the table. You must put in place the infrastructure that allows business users to access the data they need. It may not be a cut-and-dried situation. The customer service department, for example, requires different data models than marketing or finance. At the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm your IT systems and staff. With your parameters in place, shop for a big data platform that fits your pre-defined needs. This preparation will make you resistant to hype.

3. Work across stakeholders. Marketing, sales, finance, facilities — all of these departments are now in your wheelhouse. Meet with stakeholders to find out where each organization needs the most improvement, and set up your data analytics platform to address these needs. Work out the correct correlations, benchmarks and data models.

Big data can help your company find new customers, eliminate operational inefficiencies, and uncover new ways to make and save money. Even better, with today’s apps and platforms, any company can achieve these benefits. Big data isn’t just for big companies, any more.

Watch this space for our series exploring how companies of all sizes can achieve meaningful impact with big data — and how CIOs can make themselves legends throughout their organizations.

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Ask for a demo to see how GoodData can help you turn your data into a source of profit and competitive advantage.

The post How Big Data Can Help You Become a Legendary CIO appeared first on GoodData.

But retail isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition, even if you bring in a CEO with gold stars on his report card. By slashing prices and bringing in hipster apparel, the new CEO lost the retailer almost $1 billion. Despite his former success, he failed to address Penney’s core market of budget shoppers who prefer form-forgiving clothing.

The Wisdom of Data

Think of how the situation would have been different if, rather than relying on intuition and dismissing data to the contrary, the Penney team looked at data to guide their plans. Knowing that their core audience prefers conservative clothing, Penney could have found appropriate new brands for shoppers. By reading the numbers of which types of pricing work best, Penney could have been more strategic about its discounting approach.

It should be a lesson for us all. Company leaders—CEOs and boards—should hold decision-makers accountable for making data driven decisions. Otherwise, the risk of a gut-based disaster like Penney’s becomes very real.

C-Suite Data Insights

It is not enough to simply say that decisions should be data driven. CEOs should hold each of her direct reports accountable for providing visibility into their piece of the data pie. No one should be making decisions based solely on intuition or gut. The CEO has to demand visibility into all aspects of the business, so she can make the best strategic decisions for the entire company.

The VP of Sales should provide visibility into the sales funnel for the quarter. In addition, he should be showing how this quarter is performing against the historical ramp, so problem with funnel can be identified early and action can be taken.

It is the CMO’s job to use data analysis to innovate new solutions for branding, company reputation, customer targeting and product pricing. Car insurance companies, for example, are delivering different rates to people who drive to the same destination, but use different routes to get there, according to Forbes.

The COO should be optimizing the company’s resources, from equipment to carbon-neutrality. Analytics make it possible to ensure that every moving part of the business is performing at benchmark levels and is in line with company budgets.

Using analytics, the CFO should discover new financial efficiencies across departments. He can trim the fat in an organization, reduce financial risk and use data to drive budget decisions.

Analytics provide a high level of detail about customers, and the systems driving this visibility are powerful and sometimes complex on the back-end. The CIO must ensure the health of all the IT systems behind the company’s big data analytics. If they’re in-house, the CIO should have a solid maintenance and tuning regimen; if analytics are SaaS-based, the CIO is in charge of setting them up and collaborating with service providers to ensure seamless execution.

The CEO has the Final Word

By analyzing massive quantities of data from diverse sources, analytics can be used to pinpoint trends and new opportunities that otherwise would never be discovered. It is up to the CEO to gather information from each team member and decide how data results should best be used to increase the company’s competitive edge. Armed with data insights, she can use the collective experience to make the best decision. But for this to happen, the CEO is on the hook to make data and data visibility an integral part of the company’s culture.

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Ask for a demo to see how GoodData can help you turn your data into a source of profit and competitive advantage.

The post CEOs: Hold Your Team Accountable for Data Analysis appeared first on GoodData.

The following guest blog was written by John O’Farrell, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and GoodData investor and board member.

On my Andreessen Horowitz blog, I told the story of how a massive software licensing deal with EDS in 2002 saved our money-losing cloud services company, Loudcloud, and enabled us to start life again as a data center software provider, renamed Opsware. EDS agreed to pay us a total of $52 million in quarterly installments to license our software over three years, ramping up to $20 million a year by Year Three.

What’s less well-known is that, 18 months later (halfway through the contract term), EDS still had not deployed a production instance of our software on any of the tens of thousands of servers for which they were paying us a quarterly subscription fee.

There were many good reasons for this: 1) Our software was not initially suitable for use by anyone other than us. 2) Their big-company inertia. 3) Our focus on signing additional customers. Even so, the inescapable fact was that we had a year-and-a-half to get EDS to use our software in a big way, or we’d lose a $20 million annual revenue stream. As a public company, the disclosure alone that EDS declined to renew would have killed us.

So here is what we did about it:

1. We assigned a dedicated account management team. Comprising top managers and engineers, the team focused on getting our software fully deployed — and used — at EDS.

2. We developed and executed a full plan. We cast a critical eye on everything we needed to do to keep EDS happy — from product changes and deployment tools to training, documentation, connecting with executives and evangelization.

The result is that EDS not only deployed our software, but it also renewed the license in 2005 for another $50 million.

Farmers vs. Hunters.

Back in 2002, a software subscription deal like ours with EDS was highly unusual. All enterprise companies sold their software as one-time perpetual licenses. With no recurring revenue apart from maintenance fees, you had to start from scratch every quarter to keep feeding the revenue engine — but you got paid regardless of whether the customer ever used your software.

By contrast, today’s successful SaaS businesses like GoodData start each quarter with a big chunk of monthly recurring revenue from customers signed in prior quarters. That makes SaaS businesses very attractive to investors once they get that initial recurring revenue flywheel spinning. It also means that getting existing customers fully deployed, as well as keeping them highly satisfied, is absolutely critical. In a SaaS business, churn kills.

While that may sound obvious, losing customers at contract renewal time is the Achilles Heel of many a SaaS startup, for a couple of reasons:

1. Chronology:  The company’s focus in its first year has to be on winning customers.  Renewals, by definition, come later.

2. Incentives:  The company’s board and management often emphasize winning new customers over making existing ones happy — and reward salespeople accordingly.

Some companies choose to address this by compensating their salespeople for renewals and upsells — not just new bookings. While there is some merit to doing this, I don’t see it as a full solution. Getting a customer fully engaged and deriving full value from your product is an ongoing project, not a one-time event like landing a new booking. It demands a different mindset — more of a farmer mentality than a hunter. Most salespeople are hunters. That’s good, since you want your sales team focused on winning new customers to keep the business growing. But it’s not enough.

A better answer is to create a dedicated Account Management function — like we did for EDS — with the accountability for keeping customers happy and renewed, and with the authority to ensure customers’ needs are met.

This goes way beyond technical support. Instead of focusing on the technical weeds, the team concentrates on helping customers achieve business success. That means understanding customers’ use cases, and working with them to ensure the products or services deliver the business value they crave. The best teams also act as ombudsmen — providing access to anyone inside the company who can offer the expertise or insight their customers require.

That mindset practically guarantees 100 percent renewals. But there are additional benefits, as well. These include:

• Giving customers a single point of contact.

• Creating an internal champion for customers by connecting them with the experts they need.

• Uncovering upsell opportunities (expanding use within the current environment) and cross-sell opportunities (finding new opportunities in other customer projects and departments).

• Building a rich set of customer success stories and references.

• Helping manage customer expectations.

• Providing an ongoing feedback loop for the product.

What It All Means

Investing in a dedicated account management function is an investment in customers’ success. GoodData recently made that investment, putting in place a fully staffed account management team under Jonathan Cogan. If you’re a GoodData customer, you can expect regular, consistent business reviews with his team so that they understand your goals and what they need to do to help you get there.

And if you’re an up and coming SaaS company, you need to think about how you can keep those customers you’ve spent so much on to acquire. It’s time to recruit some farmers!

Image Courtesy of Colorado State University

The post Farmers Versus Hunters: The Importance of Account Management appeared first on GoodData.