ROI in the Age of Limitless Data

Your company invested in a CRM to make data-driven decisions that drive your company’s future. Alas, you log into Salesforce and… it’s bare.

What the… ?

Most companies think their customer-facing teams have a discipline problem, that they don’t document their sales cycle because they’re “lazy.”

The interesting thing about CRM adoption — it isn’t isolated to poor performers, being just as prevalent amongst the best performers. CRM hygiene is almost universally bad. In our experience, and backed up by countless studies and customer accounts, the system of record that every company spends an inordinate amount of money licensing and maintaining is missing mountains of information.

Must be discipline — except that it’s not.

If that’s the case, why do we brand these people as lazy?

Throughout my twenty years of sales experience, when looking at top performers, the biggest thing that separated them from the pack was resourcefulness — they created an easier way to get the data they needed, when they needed it.

That’s great for the individual, but how do you capture that information in order to take advantage of it at a macro-level?

Enter the new ROI — my favourite acronym for Return On Information.

Let’s turn to a recent conversation I had with a Head of Sales Enablement:

Ask yourself this — which role in the company has the most explicit ways of measuring success? The answer is sales (and anything else customer-facing, frankly — whether you’re measured on churn, renewals, growth or number of logos, you have a target on your head). Now ask yourself this — how are they paid? In most cases 50%+ of their compensation is predicated on their performance. If that were you, how would you prioritize your time?

The problem here isn’t one of discipline.

Half of their pay cheque comes from their ability to perform — which is measured under an almost-daily microscope. By the very nature of how we set up our businesses (which gets worse when you’re publicly traded, by the way) and how we benchmark their success, customer-facing teams have a built-in sense of urgency. A side effect of that is a need for immediacy.

How do companies answer the bell when it comes to immediacy? By and large, they don’t.

Data is rolled up into reports. Reports are analyzed and used to make broad-based decisions (e.g. product roadmap, annual projections, hiring plans, etc). Generally, the outcomes of those decisions aren’t felt by sales people until much further down the road. Kind of at odds with the way we wired the brains of our customer-facing teams, isn’t it?

If you really want your teams to give you information, the best way to do so is to not only prove to them that you’ll do something with the data, but that you’ll do something with it now!

Why does this matter? The outcomes of the data are often far too removed from when it was captured.

Enter the new ROI.

Much like oil or gold which don’t serve a great purpose until they act as fuel sources or ornate jewelry, information in and of itself is useless. It’s what you do with that information that makes it valuable.

Ask yourself this simple question next time: “is the data I’m capturing being put in motion now or am I storing it in hopes that one day I’ll find a need to look back at it?”

Selling is tough and it’s getting even tougher as buyers get smarter and smarter.

What are you doing to arm your customer-facing teams with the tools they need when they need them to combat this? What does your sales enablement program look like? It needs to be more than onboarding, a sales wiki and a bunch of battlecards. As you examine that process, think about how it relates back to the information that your team is capturing in their meetings.

Ultimately, know your Return On Information and, if you know what it is, your customer-facing teams will too — long before you’ve told them — good or bad!

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