McKinsey & Company: Using Advanced Analytics To Boost Revenue

Advanced analytics can be an important piece of the revenue puzzle in B2B sales organizations.A closer look at those who are succeeding in creating high-performing sales organizations shows that 53 percent rate themselves as effective users of analytics, according to a survey of over 1,000 organizations by McKinsey & Company.

However, there’s a lot of complexity in collecting, handling and analyzing massive amounts of internal and external sales data.

Over half (57 percent) of companies feel they don’t make proper use of advanced analytics, so this is a missed opportunity. Sales leaders who are not using the power of analytics to gain insights about their organizations are falling behind.

How Analytics Makes More Money for Sales Leaders

There are four big sources of value for analytics in sales: lead generation, matching people, maximizing customer value and pricing, shows McKinsey. Some of these issues, like lead quality and quality, as well as hiring and recruiting, are permanently being referenced by sales leaders as major problems that are constantly on their mind.

Analytics in sales is a seismic shift in the sales process. Sales leaders and reps can instantly access all sales and customer historical data, as well as external data. This allows them to move from acting on gut feelings to data-driven decision-making. Here are some of the results that the McKinsey and Company report identifies:

• Radically improve lead generation with lead scoring technology, showing sales reps exactly which leads need to be contacted, how and when in order to maximize their chances of success
• Matching people in the right areas of sales by offering insight into coverage planning, improving field productivity, talent management as well as sales pipeline forecasting.
• Maximizing lifetime customer value by allowing laser-focus segmentation on customers likely to respond to cross-sell/ups-sell offers and reducing customer churn
• Analytics can also help with pricing decisions, allowing sales reps to base their decisions on similar deals from the same vertical, rather than pricing based on a hunch

Advanced Analytics for Sales Webinar

Gabe Larsen, VP of Growth at XANT, and Maria Valdivieso, Director of Knowledge at McKinsey and Company, discuss best practices in implementing analytics for sales organizations. Join the webinar to learn:

• How successful companies work with data in sales to get 30% increase in revenue
• The 5 important steps for implementing advanced analytics in your company
• How sales leaders can avoid the pitfalls of working with sales data