“Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc., to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”
– Marketing commentator Michael Palmer in 2006
While some people have been out in front of this predictive analytics thing for quite some time, B2B sales teams have been among the last to embrace the notion that using science to obtain a deeper understanding of what customers want and how to deliver it can transform sales performance.
In the new book “Selling Through Someone Else: How to Use Agile Sales Networks and Partners to Sell More,” three executives at Accenture, one of the world’s largest consulting companies, address the challenge of identifying a starting point for applying analytics capabilities across the end-to-end sales process.
“It is important for a company to be judicious about choosing its starting point. Analytics can only be successful if they are acted on, and that means the use of analytics must be connected to decision making,” state authors Robert Wollan, Naveen Jain and Michael Heald. (Many of the book chapters are credited to other Accenture employees, including the one on “Bringing Science to Selling,” which is authored by Jan Van der Linden.)
The authors identify three routes for finding the best starting point:
1. Choose a high-profile problem – For example, unpredictable shifts in demand
2. Follow the value – Find a true lever for growth or support a chosen growth strategy
3. Tie in with strategic objectives – Look for analytical approaches that emphasize a small set of key objectives
But don’t turn sales reps into number crunchers, the authors warn. “Most salespeople do not have the appetite or the temperament to spend significant amounts of time generating analyses.” But they should have the capability and the willingness to act on the results and outputs of analytics.
“Selling on the basis of facts and insights is a crucial skill for a successful sales professional and will become dramatically more important in the next few decades as market complexities increase and analytics as a competitive advantage come closer to maturity,” they add. “Just don’t ask salespeople to chase those facts and insights themselves.”
