Preface

A sales revolution is coming!

The next decade will witness a sea change in the way large and medium-size businesses manage their sales functions. Companies that fail to adapt to the new realities and adopt the new practices risk falling behind their competitors who do.

If you're a business leader of an enterprise-level corporation who shoulders some measure of responsibility for sales effectiveness, you need to know about and prepare for this coming revolution. Whether you realize it or not, you and your business are heading toward a tipping point, from which there can be no turning back. In fact, some of your best customers have likely already tipped. They are thinking about the sales process in a different and more compelling way than you have in the past. If you don't react now, you risk losing them forever.

To succeed in this new competitive environment, your company will need to revolutionize sales function management. It must learn to harness the power of data analytics, not just as a tool, but as a mindset. Gone are the days you or your sales leadership can work on intuition, gut feel, or past history. None of this is relevant in the new order.

Here's the Crux

"Big data" isn't just big, it's huge. Data analytics and predictive and prescriptive analytics aren't just buzz words. They're a new reality that you and I and everyone else in the business world must understand, embrace, wield, and inculcate into our corporate cultures. Scores of books have been written about how these powerful tools can improve sales performance. But most restrict their attention to a few discrete applications, such as reducing customer turnover (churn), identifying fraud (shrinkage), perfecting and positioning products, and improving the hiring, training, and increased time to productivity of sales reps.

These applications are very valuable, but they fail to capitalize on the full potential of data analytics to holistically transform sales effectiveness in all functional areas of an organization. This type of transformation is possible. I know it's possible, because I've taken the journey. My fellow travelers and I didn't have a map, because we were going into uncharted territories. But as we moved forward, each next step revealed itself to us in a continuous process discovery, learning, adapting, and accelerating change.

This book is a map of sorts. I wrote it so that you, too, can take this journey. My goal is to help you find the path to greater success for your company's sales organization by harnessing the power of data analytics. But like any other map, you have to know where you are going. You will need to adapt to your unique situation to fully leverage the opportunity for yourself and your organization.

Sharpen Your Competitive Edge

In this age when companies are competing on a global scale at electronic speed, maintaining a competitive advantage is increasingly difficult. In their excellent book Competing on Analytics,1 Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris put it this way:

"Many of the previous bases for competition are no longer available. Unique geographical advantage doesn't matter in global competition, and protective regulation is largely gone. Proprietary technologies are rapidly copied, and breakthrough innovation in products or services seems increasingly difficult to achieve. What's left as a basis for competition is to execute your business with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, and to make the smartest business decisions possible."

That's the kind of advantage data analytics can give you.

My insights about data analytics come not only from my own experiences of adopting and adapting to this new reality, but also from my ability to pull back the curtain on what other companies are doing. In my current role as the senior vice president, chief learning officer at SAP, the world's largest business-to-business software company, and founder of my own company, Actionable Analytics Group, I regularly consult with corporations around the world about their human capital management and talent development strategies. I see how companies on the forefront of the big data and predictive analytics revolution are using these advanced strategies to drive breakthrough business results with their internal sales talent. And I can say with considerable assurance that few, if any, corporations are using these tools in an integrated approach to comprehensively impact the sales cycle from start to finish.

The purpose of this book is to tell you how you can be a pioneer in this emerging field.

The Birth of a Vision

One of the perks of living in Palo Alto, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is that at any given social gathering you can find yourself chatting with some of the top technical minds in the world. These are people who are truly changing the game, inventing solutions that no one ever thought of before, and showing the world that they cannot live without them. I particularly remember a cocktail party that took place some years ago in the home of a very successful venture capitalist. I was invited because the host and my husband had done some real estate deals together.

The setting was elegant, but relaxed. In one corner of the living room a musician hired for the occasion played Beatles songs on a grand piano, while a sharply dressed young lady circulated with trays of hors d'oeuvres. I wandered into an interesting conversation with three venture capitalists (VCs). All fit the stereotype: trim, tanned, dressed in jeans and long-sleeve, collared shirts rolled up at the cuffs.

The conversation ranged from physical fitness to travel, and finally to investing. All three of the VCs had recently invested in a tiny new startup called Google. (No one mentioned Facebook, because at this time Mark Zuckerberg was just starting high school.)

After listening to these three men talk about how they used return-on-investment calculations when making decisions, I said, "That's what corporations should do internally. But in my job as a change management consultant at Hewlett-Packard, I see managers making a lot of bad decisions that are based more on gut feel than on data."

"Corporations already use ROI when making decisions about purchases of new equipment and that sort of thing," said Kevin, the host of the party. "What other kinds of decisions are you talking about?"

"For example, if they collected data on the performance of individual people in relation to the expected value of their roles, they could calculate the ROI of every hire," I suggested. "They'd have a better idea about what types of people to hire and how to make them more successful. They could also tailor training programs to the specific needs of each individual, instead of merely running everyone through courses chosen by gut instinct or according to the latest fad. If they had data on the performance of these individuals, they could measure the ROI of every training. This would be especially powerful for high-impact roles in sales."

"I'm all for making sales more of a highly structured, data-driven process, and less the domain of the 'wild west cowboy' types who excel in charisma, golf, and holding their liquor," said another of the men.

"But how are companies going to get this data?" someone asked. "What system would this data tap into to provide relevant information that could drive business decisions or be used to make predictions?"

None of us knew the answers to these questions. This was back in 2000, when the Internet was still in its infancy. The data may have been there locked deep in the data center on endless spools of recording media, but the technology simply didn't exist to bring this data to life and to support such futuristic thinking. The discussion tapered off and our group dispersed.

Later that evening, Kevin, one of the VCs I was speaking with, came over to me. "I want you to come to work for one of my startups. I think you can help them."

I'm so glad I accepted Kevin's job offer. It gave me the opportunity to put into practice some of the concepts we had discussed that evening. Looking back, I believe I was present at the birth of a vision for the transformation of the sales function. It's been my privilege to be part of the revolution ever since.

What You Can Expect from This Book

In these pages, I'll introduce you to PAM, the "Prescriptive Action Model" that my team and I developed. It is the first data analysis program that integrates sales, sales operations, sales training, marketing, IT, human resources, and other sales functions into a comprehensive system to dramatically improve sales effectiveness across an entire corporation. You will learn how PAM works and how you might adopt its concepts. And the information you gain will help you lead an initiative to transform your organization.

In addition to being informative and practical, I wanted this book to be accessible and enjoyable to read. So each chapter begins with a fictional story based on the lessons the contributors to this book and I have learned while working for more than a dozen companies (such as Borland, Hewlett-Packard, Interwise, KPMG, Microsoft, Motorola, Oracle, Salesforce.com,...