5 Scientific Tips to Measure Sales Productivity 

Rahul Mathew on June 6, 2024

In ongoing economic uncertainty, many sales orgs struggle to meet their goals. According to Forrester, more than half of B2B sales reps aren’t achieving quota.

But even in these trying times, it is possible to grow a team of top sellers that are equipped to overcome challenges, deliver winning experiences, and close more deals.

All sales leaders understand that improving sales productivity is key to improving sales outcomes. After all, sales productivity measures how effective and efficient your sales reps are. When a sales rep improves their effectiveness and efficiency, they’ll close more deals – faster.

But many sales leaders aren’t quite sure how to best measure sales productivity. We’re here to help solve the mystery.

In this post, we’ll explore everything you need to know about measuring sales productivity – the scientific way. We’ll cover:

  • How Mindtickle measures sales productivity
  • The problem with how sales organizations often measure sales productivity
  • How Mindtickle tracks sales productivity KPIs
  • 5 scientific tips for measuring your team’s sales productivity

How Mindtickle measures sales productivity

At Mindtickle, we define sales productivity as the efficiency and effectiveness of your sales executives in hitting a variety of revenue milestones and goals. Of course, just because reps make more calls and send more emails does not necessarily mean they are progressing sales or generating revenue.

That’s why, in addition to accountability around activity tracking, measuring preparation and improving effectiveness is key.

Here, we use our Sales Readiness Index to measure which reps demonstrate the right skills, will, and in-field behaviors. With our readiness index, we cross-reference who is hitting quota with who is doing all of the other activities that make a rep successful, such as:

  • Conducting effective outreach
  • Engaging buyers
  • Sending educational content
  • Completing new product and competitor training
  • Practicing via AI video role-plays
  • Achieving high call scores
Screenshot of Mindtickle Sales Readiness Index

At the same time, we use revenue intelligence and AI forecasting software through our technical partner BoostUp to help our sellers call their numbers with higher accuracy and confidence.

Deal risk analytics give detailed signals that help reps know exactly what action they need to take when they follow up, such as better multi-threading with a higher number of senior-level contacts.

Salesforce - Revenue Intelligence

Our sales enablement function moved from a traditional approach, where most time was spent creating content and delivering training, to focusing on call and deal reviews. We call this revenue enablement and have rallied our entire organization to ensure sellers focus on closing more deals confidently.

The problem with how sales organizations measure sales productivity today

Many organizations use Salesforce to track revenue metrics and sales productivity. Yet, not long ago, sales professionals started to game the system to hit their numbers. Maybe they exaggerated prospecting or sandbagged their forecast so they could sweep in as the hero at the end of the quarter or got overly optimistic about pricing and happy ears.

Here at Mindtickle, our revenue intelligence and forecasting solution is built into our readiness platform, so our sales managers use a new workflow to gain deeper transparency into deals, calls, and buyer engagement.

You can see that workflow in our interactive sales manager product tour here.

Instead of looking at lagging indicators of success, such as who has the most pipeline or who has historically hit their numbers, we look at what our reps do holistically to prepare for the future climate. We better understand where our reps put their time and calories and have implemented accountability systems to help them uncover risks and focus on truly winnable deals.

This means our executives have real-time visibility into every call, email, and meeting, and they spend more time helping reps uncover deal blockers so they forecast more accurately and help reps deliver faster, better wins.

How Mindtickle tracks sales productivity KPIs

Sales productivity can be tracked in many ways. Here are some metrics we use to keep our sellers and BDRs on track.

With our revenue intelligence solution,every deal is scored and labeled red, yellow, or green so reps know exactly why a deal is at risk, and how to address it.

With our Call AI solution, we score every call against the winning behaviors from top reps on every team, including BDRs, account executives, sales engineers, and customer success executives

We look at not only the number of emails and dials our reps make but also the percent of those connected touchpoints that convert. This helps us understand quantity and quality.

We look at not only the number of meetings that are scheduled but also those that were completed and deemed sales-qualified or not by our reps.

By analyzing all of the calls, emails, and meetings that take place, we are able to uncover keywords associated with deal risks or positive/negative buyer sentiment. Increasingly, buyer engagement and sentiment are a really important metric for us as we look to forecast more accurately and truly assess deal health.

Our sales content management solution tracks metrics beyond just asset views and also looks at content adoption. This includes the number of times each asset has been used in the sales process, the percentage of sellers who have used each asset, and the number of times each asset has been shared in deals progressing in stages including closed/won.

This includes onboarding and ramp-up metrics for new hires like time to onboarding completion, time to first deal/revenue, average ramp time, annual number of new hires, and yearly rep attrition.

We also look at everboarding or ongoing readiness metrics like seconds of training videos watched, pages of documents read, correct answers on assessments and questions asked over time, scores on video role-plays, overall team performance on programs, certification completions, rep feedback on program efficacy, and overall engagement.

We look at whether reps, teams, and regions have enough pipeline coverage to hit their numbers.

5 scientific tips to measure sales productivity

So, how do we measure all of this vast data and make sense of it without creating a ton of work for our operations team, which is in charge of measuring sales productivity and forecasting?

1. End manual data entry

The days of relying on manually entered Salesforce data and trusting it’s correct are long dead. We implemented revenue intelligence and forecasting through our BoostUp integration to track the activities that meaningfully move deals forward (or stall them).

To do this, we started by tracking buyer engagement across every call, email, and meeting – all of which we transcribe and tag when we uncover an important voice of customer insight, such as a competitor or product mention, next step, or strong instance of buyer hesitation.

We use this information to score every deal and proactively uncover risks. At the same time, we improved the way we manage opportunities by pulling together a rich visualization of all of the activity that has taken place—including what emails buyers and sellers have sent, what calls have taken place, what meaningful sales themes have been mentioned, and even whether or not our sellers have created a Digital Sales Room to engage customers with educational content.

This helps us offer reps self-coaching by nudging them with activities we know will move a deal forward, such as follow-up content they might want to send or battle cards they should review before their next call.

Our enterprise team takes a more account-based approach. We track the number and percentage of accounts in each rep’s territory that haven’t had activity logged in the last 30 days.

To ensure our enterprise and commercial teams are multi-threaded, we track the number of personas engaged in an opportunity and whether we’ve reached the VP+ level.

Content analytics are also important to us. This year, we launched our Digital Sales Rooms, a digital buyer experience that helps reps share content, understand what content customers and prospects are engaging with, link to call recordings, and manage the next steps.

Digital sales rooms have helped our sellers better multi-thread and improve engagement with our content by 300%.

2. Cut meetings in half, and reserve more time for practice & coaching

One invaluable tool for sales productivity is Call AI – our conversation intelligence technology that records, transcribes, and analyzes every call while making calls easily shareable with other departments, such as product or marketing.

Now that our sellers can listen to calls on 2X that they weren’t a part of and don’t have to spend time on internal updates calls and hand-offs, it’s faster and easier for every relevant person here at Mindtickle, such as our CSMs, to get the deep details on every deal or account while attending fewer but more valuable meetings.

Where did we reinvest those hours of precious extra time each week?

Into practicing via AI video role-plays and data-driven call coaching.

3. Create better buyer experiences

Sales productivity has never been about drowning customers in emails and cold calls. It’s been about connecting with the right person, at the right time, with meaningful information that helps them solve significant business challenges.

That’s why we started using Databook to provide our sales reps with better information on how their accounts are doing financially and their “big bets.”. This enables reps to provide hyper-personalized outreach and follow-ups.

At the same time, we regularly share call recordings with our customers so that they can include others who may have missed a meeting without slowing the sales cycle down.

4. Leverage AI for more accurate pipeline & sales forecasting

Earlier in this blog, we discussed how sales productivity is a better leading indicator to drive scalable, repeatable sales and enable fact-based forecasting.

Perhaps no group in our organization is better at reaping the rewards of our newfound focus on sales productivity than our operations organization.

Whereas before, reps and regional vice presidents would manually call their number, we now use revenue intelligence and forecasting software to analyze that number and how realistic it is with AI. Then, we uncover pipeline trends and risks that may prevent us from hitting it.

We can also examine week-over-week and month-over-month waterfall charts to analyze where our pipeline is growing and decreasing and better address issues with enablement programs.

This saves our revenue operations more than 30 hours previously spent on manual reporting a week.

5. Consolidate redundant sales technologies

In this economic moment, it’s common for sales teams to be asked to reduce their sales technology budgets by 30-50%, or even more. That’s a lofty challenge, but it’s also a painful reminder that too many teams are using bloated, expensive sales tech stacks that aren’t helping improve their ability to hit their number.

Our 2024-2025 Chief Revenue Officer + Sales Leader Outlook Report found that 66% of respondents indicate there are 10 or more tools to support their tech stack.

of orgs have 10 or more tools in their tech stacks
0 %

However, investing in a sales tool doesn’t necessarily mean the sales team will use it. The same analysis found a consistent pattern: the percentage of tools in the tech stack is often higher than the percentage of tools used daily.

Here are some solutions we use at Mindtickle:

  • Our platform, through which we run enablement, manage content, and operate all of our conversation intelligence, revenue intelligence, and forecasting solutions, including enabling our reps to update Salesforce
  • Outreach.IO for BDR prospecting
  • Databook to uncover personalized account-based insights
  • LinkedIn Navigator & ZoomInfo to find prospects and contacts across our accounts

Supercharge your sales productivity with Mindtickle

Every sales leader out there wants to boost quota attainment. However, focusing solely on what number will or won’t be hit has never helped sales leaders hit quota. Often, numbers are settled well before you enter the quarter. And in this economy, even deals that once looked highly winnable may be lost.

Instead, focus on leading indicators – like sales productivity. Doing so provides a better way to understand how prepared your reps are to sell and how quickly your team is improving. By using the tips we shared in this blog, you can start measuring sales productivity – in a scientific way.

Increasing sales productivity doesn’t happen by chance. Instead, you must equip your sales reps with the right tools, training, information, and sales content they need to be effective, efficient sellers.

Better sales productivity with Mindtickle

The world’s best revenue organizations depend on Mindtickle to ensure their teams have everything they need to increase sales productivity – all in one platform.

Request a Demo

This post was originally published in December 2022 and was updated in June 2024. 

Video: How Reps Accelerate Bigger, Faster Deals with Consolidation

Rahul Mathew on February 1, 2024

Today’s post features a video from our recent “Reduce Your Technology Stack” video series. In this video, one of our revenue productivity experts, Rahul Mathew, shares how one leading cybersecurity customer transitioned away from a growth-at-all-costs mentality where many reps were underperforming into a data-driven selling org that can scale and consistently meet its revenue targets. 

Key takeaways:

  • Get more reps contributing to quota. This customer overcame a dependence on a small number of reps to meet quota each quarter. By emphasizing repeatable quota contributions from a larger and more diverse set of reps, this customer met their $50M run rate, and their revenue model is more sustainable.
  • Track the right things. Success depended on tracking both team and individual metrics. By tracking deal and pipeline risk, this customer was able to achieve repeatable quota attainment, improved pipeline health, and reduced the time to win.
  • Focus on healthy deals. This customer knew that top-line metrics weren’t what mattered. They shifted their focus to healthy, winnable deals in the existing pipeline. They analyzed their time-to-win and time-to-lose rates and identified opportunities that were ripe for improvement.

Video transcription

Hello everybody, this is Rahul Matthew from the Product Marketing team at Mindtickle. I’m here today as part of the 2024 Reduce Technology Technology Chaos video series. I’m here today to talk about how reps can actually accelerate bigger, faster deals through consolidation.

Let’s dive into a customer example. I want to discuss a specific customer – a leading AI cybersecurity provider. Their CRO was mandated to ensure they were improving revenue productivity across the organization. Now, a couple of challenges he could foresee as a CRO were – if you think about a lot of the organizations today – a lot of organizations today are moving from growth at all costs to driving revenue productivity at scale.

Secondly, having dependence on a specific set of sales reps, you know, doesn’t necessarily help you meet your run rate or revenue target. For instance, in order to meet the run rate of $50M USD, there was a growing reliance on repeat repeatable quota contributions from a larger set of sales reps.

One use case this customer could implement was tracking pipeline risk analytics and putting data into practice. Secondly, ensure there were continuous improvements, not just for the team but also for the individual reps. This resulted in repeatable quota attainment, improved pipeline health, and reduced time to win. Eventually, reps started seeing the acceleration of many of those bigger, faster deals through this consolidation exercise.

Here’s how they cut down the chaos. First and foremost, ensuring repeatable quota contributions. Now, it has become very vital to drive repeatable quota contributions, not just from a select set of reps, a select set of reps, but also from a larger number of sales reps beyond those top-performing reps. Pipeline risk analytics was vital to focus on cleansing the pipeline and identifying disengaged prospects. This involves constant risk scoring and discussions with the team to improve engagement so as to get those conversations back on track.

Building trust with the teams [was imperative.] The customer was privy to many data points, and unleashing these data points in one shot was not good. It was going to be counterproductive. Getting those data points gradually out to the team and then getting them to collaborate in a more productive way helped avoid disengagement and perceived micromanagement.

Upgrading their sales process and methodical methodology [was key.] Focusing on key milestones in the sales process helped ensure that things were on track. Insight-driven decision making [was imperative] Insights provide a contextual view. Allowing for those informed decisions to actually happen and having impactful arguments in board meetings was one of the things that they were able to do as well. [The customer also] focused on those healthy deals. There was a shift from focusing on top-line metrics to truly healthy and winnable deals in the existing pipeline. This required analyzing time-to-win and time-to-lose rates and helped identify those opportunities that were ripe for improvement, Along with reducing risks.

These are some of the things that helped this customer cut down their chaos in a significant way. If you’d like to learn more about more actionable insights from your revenue enablement or operations perspective from some pharmaceutical experts, please feel free to scan this QR code and get more details. Thank you.

Reduce Your Tech Stack Chaos

Ready to see how you can cut down the chaos in your sales processes and get more reps to hit quota every quarter? 

Request a Demo

5 Sales Performance Dashboard Examples CROs Must Have to Improve Sales Readiness

Parth Mukherjee on January 9, 2024

CROs today have no shortage of dashboards to access across tools and teams. Bloated tech stacks – more than a third of companies in our recent research indicate sales orgs are using 10+ tools – means that it’s not a matter of finding data, it’s about sorting through sales performance dashboards to understand what’s important and what to do about it.

Sales orgs are using

Tools in their tech stacks
0 +

And CROs don’t have time for that.

It’s pretty straightforward: here’s what they want to know:

  • Why deals are won or lost
  • When pipeline is at risk
  • Where managers are spending time in sales coaching efforts
  • Which enablement efforts are (or aren’t) working and scalable
  • How to get more sellers hitting quota

They need a whole view of sales performance that’s inclusive of data from sales, enablement, operations, and marketing activities and they don’t want to sort through 10 different dashboards to find that reporting.

Complete visibility is possible and in this blog post, we’ll lay out the sales performance dashboards that will help CROs create scalability and winning in their sales orgs.

In this blog post, we’ll talk about:

  • What is a sales performance dashboard
  • Why adoption is not a reliable metric for sales performance
  • 5 key sales performance dashboards for CROs

What is a sales performance dashboard?

A sales performance dashboard is a single hub for all your most important sales metrics including sales KPIs, hiring and onboarding metrics, training and coaching metrics, outreach metrics, and pipeline metrics. Broken down, here’s what RevOps and sales enablement leaders focus on:

Conversation intelligence, sales forecasting, and Digital Sales Rooms that also include integrations with CRMs and sales engagement tools

Revenue productivity, sales content management, and sales coaching data that also pulls data from tools like HRMS and sales performance solutions

A good sales performance dashboard should go beyond the stuff you find in the CRM and really help you understand which deals are at risk and answer questions like where you have issues with buyer engagement, potential issues with seller efficiency, who needs help on what topics, and how to win more.

For example, you should have visibility into which content and programs truly drive an ROI for customers, voice of market insights from calls on competitors, pricing, and so on.

On top of those considerations, best-in-class sales performance dashboards should also include the following:

This is the total amount of revenue generated by the sales team over a given period of time.

This is the percentage increase or decrease in sales revenue compared to a previous period.

This refers to the number and value of deals that are currently in progress and have not yet closed.

This is the percentage of leads that are converted into customers.

This is the average dollar amount of each closed deal.

This is the amount of time it takes to close a deal, from initial contact to signed contract.

This is the cost of acquiring a new customer, including sales and marketing expenses.

This is the total amount of revenue a customer is expected to generate over their lifetime.

This is a measure of how efficiently the sales team is working, such as the number of calls made or emails sent per day.

This is the percentage of deals that are won versus the percentage that are lost.

Why adoption is not a reliable metric for sales performance

To be blunt: CROs don’t care about adoption. They rely on their CRM to give them data about where deals and forecasts stand, but even those tools aren’t good indicators of whether or not the team will hit quota. Looking at adoption metrics gives a single view that doesn’t surface any valuable information about deal health.

For example, our research indicates this:

Average sales rep

Reps at winning orgs

Role-plays per year
0
Role-plays per year
0 +

It’s clear that adoption is important here — but that’s only part of the story. Without a way to track sales performance and connect them to the number of role-plays performed, you’ll never know exactly if those role-plays had any impact on the rep’s performance in the field and ultimately, any impact on closing deals.

Another example is a training module with assessments. Your entire team may have completed them, but if they don’t remember what they learned or apply it when interacting with prospects, that adoption metric doesn’t have any real impact on revenue productivity.

The takeaway is simple: No single sales metric tells a full story.

Adoption and engagement are important, yes — but to get real insight into sales performance, you need to track, analyze, and learn from a much wider variety of data. That’s why a complete sales performance dashboard that tracks metrics across all enablement activities – onboarding, ongoing training, conversation intelligence, sales content, and key competencies development – is the most effective way to see a full picture of sales performance and productivity.

What do CROs care about?

With the above in mind, it’s important to build reporting and dashboards that answer questions CROs are probably asking their teams weekly.

  • How healthy is my pipeline?
  • Which deals are at risk or progressing nicely?
  • Are reps doing the right volume of activities?
  • Are they prepared to hit quota?
  • What do my top reps do differently?
  • What do my top managers do differently?
  • What do my buyers and customers need from us in regard to positioning, pricing, our product, services, and integrations?
  • What content and enablement programs are truly driving an ROI and being used by my team?

5 key sales performance dashboards for CROs

CROs, CSOs, and sales leaders want to fully understand how their teams (and even individual sellers) are moving toward true revenue productivity. For example:

  • Is a new team or rep ready to sell?
  • What are the top skill gaps in the organization?
  • What do most reps do right (or wrong) in sales conversations?

In order to derive such insights, they’ve got to have the right data at the ready — visually presented in a way that’s easy to consume and take action on.

Though the sales performance metrics tracked vary from organization to organization, these are five key data reports all CROs need to improve sales performance.

Pipeline + deal risk

A pipeline deal risk dashboard is a visual representation of the various risks associated with pipeline deals that allow CROs to assess the risks involved in each deal, prioritize deals based on their risk level, and take appropriate measures to mitigate them. Typically, these dashboards include the following:

This provides an overview of the current pipeline deals, including the deal value, stage, and potential risks associated with the deal.

This section provides a detailed analysis of the risks associated with each deal. It includes factors such as the deal’s complexity, potential hurdles, and revenue impact. The risk assessment helps CROs identify the most significant risks so they can prioritize efforts accordingly.

This section provides updates on the progress of each deal, including milestones achieved, timelines, and any deviations from the original plan. It allows CROs to identify any potential issues early and take corrective action.

Sales Readiness Index

This dashboard helps organizations assess their sales team’s readiness to sell their products or services and provides an overall view of the sales team’s capabilities, identifying strengths and weaknesses that can be addressed to improve their sales performance. A Sales Readiness Index Dashboard typically includes the following components:

An overview of the entire sales team’s performance, including metrics such as revenue generated, deals closed, and sales cycle length.

Analytics related to the training programs that are available to the sales team. It includes metrics such as completion rates, satisfaction ratings, and the effectiveness of the training programs.

Metrics such as the number of touches required to close a deal, the average time it takes to close a deal, and the conversion rate at each stage of the sales process.

This outlines metrics such as the usage of sales content, feedback from the sales team, and the effectiveness of the content in helping to close deals.

Metrics such as adoption rates, usage, and the effectiveness of the technology in improving sales performance.

Mindtickle Sales Readiness Index

Ideal rep profiles

An ideal rep profile (IRP) is a profile of a sales rep who is likely to succeed at a given organization. Much like an ICP includes characteristics that make the customer “ideal,” an IRP defines the competencies and skills a rep must have to regularly close deals and meet (and surpass) quota.

The initial step in implementing a more effective readiness approach is to establish your ideal rep profile (IRP). This involves identifying the skills and competencies that are associated with successful sales outcomes, based on observations of your top performers.

Since each organization is unique, the IRP will differ from company to company. It is essential to create an IRP that reflects your organization’s sales goals and aligns with the specific needs of your customers.

After setting up your IRP, it is crucial to evaluate your reps’ performance in comparison to these standards. This evaluation allows you to identify areas of strength and knowledge gaps that may hinder success. Understanding how each rep measures up to the benchmarks is essential in determining their skill level.

Ideal rep profile competencies

Sales coaching effectiveness

Overall, a sales coaching dashboard should provide sales coaches with the tools and information they need to improve the performance of their team and drive revenue growth. By tracking key metrics, providing targeted coaching, and enabling collaboration and communication, sales coaches can help their reps achieve their full potential and drive success for the organization.

A sales coaching dashboard should include the following metrics and features:

These should include key performance indicators (KPIs) such as win rate, deal size, and pipeline coverage.

These metrics can include things like product knowledge, selling skills, message consistency, and competitive knowledge.

Sales coaches should be able to schedule and track coaching activities such as role-play sessions, one-on-one meetings, and group training sessions. The dashboard should provide an easy way to monitor the progress of these activities and ensure that they are happening on schedule.

Conversation analysis tools can help sales coaches understand how reps are engaging with prospects and customers, identify areas of improvement, and provide targeted coaching. The dashboard should provide access to these tools and make it easy to review call recordings and other conversation data.

The dashboard should provide a way for sales coaches to collaborate with other members of the sales team and share best practices. It should also enable communication with reps to provide feedback, answer questions, and provide coaching tips.

The dashboard should provide access to sales enablement content such as training materials, playbooks, and battle cards. This content can help reps improve their skills and knowledge and enable them to engage with prospects and customers more effectively.

ROI of sales enablement efforts

This dashboard should calculate the ROI of sales enablement activities, based on the increase in revenue generated and the cost of sales enablement activities. This information can help sales leaders determine the value of sales enablement activities and make data-driven decisions about where to invest resources. It should include the following:

Includes KPIs like revenue generated, win rate, sales cycle length, and average deal size.

The dashboard should also track sales enablement activities such as training sessions, coaching sessions, and the creation and delivery of sales content.

Includes metrics that show how reps are engaging with sales enablement content, such as how often they are accessing content, which content is used most often, and the content’s impact on deal acceleration.

The dashboard should also track how sales enablement activities are impacting individual rep performance. This could include metrics such as the number of deals closed, the amount of revenue generated, and improvements in win rates and sales cycle lengths.

The dashboard should provide visibility into the cost of sales enablement activities, including the cost of creating and delivering content, and the cost of training and coaching sessions.

Access the insights you need to improve revenue productivity

Some sales metrics only tell part of the story. To fully track sales and revenue, you need a full sales performance metrics dashboard — one that helps CROs understand how training, enablement, and revenue productivity initiatives impact business results.

With Mindtickle, CROs have access to all of the performance dashboards they need to understand the impact of training and enablement on overall revenue productivity and take action to make data-based improvements. In fact, Mindtickle provides the right role-based reporting to every team member responsible for optimizing sales performance, from sales leaders to enablement to front-line managers.

Mindtickle in action

See how Mindtickle gives visibility into your sales team's performance so you can take action immediately and hit quota every quarter.

Request a Demo

This post originally appeared in October 2021, was updated in May 2023, and again in January 2024.

Video: Why CROs are Focused on Revenue Intelligence

Lindsey Plocek on June 6, 2023

 

Episode summary

In this video, Mindtickle’s Lindsey Plocek shares three different use cases for why CROs are focused on revenue intelligence. She explains the different ways sales leaders and CROs now have visibility into deal health and can more accurately forecast with revenue intelligence. She also outlines how sales coaching is data-driven with managers now able to have more impactful coaching conversations with more reps. Finally, talks about focusing on the entire customer journey rather than just deal closing. Watch this video if you’re a CRO curious to know more about how organizations can use revenue intelligence or if you’re another leader trying to make a business case for investing in it.

Key highlights

  • CROs can now address known deal risks and identify low customer engagement. Reps and managers can see things like where they need to multithread or when competitors are mentioned.
  • Leaders can now forecast based on reality rather than opinions. Historical performance and deal nuances go into deal health scores so CROs can more confidently and accurately forecast.
  • More reliable data means managers can do more accurate, holistic deal reviews.
  • Fewer managers can manage more reps and have data-driven conversations about each deal.
  • Orgs are now focused on the entire customer journey – not just closing a deal. Every single handoff in the process now has full transparency and visibility.


Video transcription

Hi, everyone, I’m Lindsay Plocek with Mindtickle and I’m going to be talking about why CROs are focused on revenue intelligence right now. Let’s start with a couple of use cases and what revenue intelligence even means.

The first is really solving buyer engagement issues at every stage in your sales cycle. Revenue intelligence will basically transcribe and score every email meeting and call so that you can really focus on those truly engaged winnable deals. Your team can go in and they can address known deal risks, or issues of ghosting or low customer engagement to really win more.

This is a little bit of what it looks like. Our reps like to go in and, and self-coach or get some guidance from their manager on where prospects are unresponsive, where they need to multithread, where a competitor was mentioned. And so that is the first use case.

The second solves meeting to forecast on reality and not opinions. So a lot of folks, forecasts historically in CRM data was very inaccurate. With revenue intelligence, we can forecast with 95% or higher accuracy, because we take into account each rep and team’s historical performance and some of the unique nuances of each deal by scoring deal health. And that helps us forecast with more confidence.

The third use case is really about improving pipeline gen and win rate by building a data-driven coaching culture. So historically, people wanted to do dealing call reviews. But it was a little difficult to scale when you didn’t have that single pane of glass view when you didn’t have really great data. Now we’re seeing more managers, or excuse me, fewer managers can manage more reps. And they can do two or three times more deal and call reviews by leveraging revenue intelligence.

Some of the other reasons why I think this is happening now at this moment in the market. The first is really alignment. So we’re moving away from a world where people are just focused on revenue and sales to one where they’re focused on that entire customer journey. Every single handoff and every single stage in that process needs to provide full transparency and visibility and a follow-up playbook.

Increasingly, we’re also seeing that more people are involved in closing a deal. So there’s a bigger need for collaboration. And this can play a big role in that data and insights specifically on how people are performing in the field, not just the activities they’re doing, but the quality of their communication with customers whether the engagement is real or not.

Perhaps even more importantly, unlocking those really great customer insights on what customers are saying or doing or responding to. So that you can ultimately improve that customer experience and really personalize it.

And as I mentioned, a culture of coaching is a really important one. And this helps with that. So we at Mindtickle recently put out a report [The 2023 State of Sales Productivity Report] on this whole topic of driving revenue productivity. We interviewed CEOs and executives from 400-plus companies, so you can go and check that out.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with us, we offer a revenue productivity platform. We give reps all of the training content and insights they need to drive deals forward. And those that include solutions for sales enablement as well as sales operations. So please, if you have questions, drop them in the comments and we’re happy to answer them.

Share this post with your own networks!

Revenue Intelligence Fundametnals

Behind its shiny wrapper and market buzz, we’ve boiled down revenue intelligence into 4 fundamental elements that actually matter.

Read More

Video: 4 Mistakes to Avoid When Choosing a Revenue Intelligence Solution

Lindsey Plocek on April 28, 2023

Episode summary

In this video, Mindtickle’s Director of Product Marketing, Lindsey Plocek, talks through the mistakes revenue operations leaders should avoid when choosing a revenue intelligence solution. She breaks down the difference between conversation intelligence and revenue intelligence and then dives into four common mistakes people might make when choosing a technology partner.

Key highlights 

Lindsey talks through the mistakes to avoid when choosing a revenue intelligence partner. Here they are:

  • Don’t focus on features focus on pain points you are solving and simplifying workflows
  • Don’t just stop it insights –  make insights actionable
  • Don’t just stop at the deal level
  • Don’t undervalue the quality of professional services

Video transcription

Hi everyone, I’m Lindsay and I lead product marketing for AI solutions at Mindtickle. Last time I came at you with some powerful tips lead discovery calls. And today I’m going to talk about four mistakes you should avoid making when choosing a partner for conversation intelligence or revenue intelligence.

Before I get into the four mistakes, I’m going to set the stage. So when I say conversation intelligence, I’m referring to technologies that record transcribe analyze sales conversations, sales meetings, as well as emails.

When I say revenue intelligence, I’m referring to using AI machine learning capabilities to analyze all of the activity taking place and actually predict what is going to close or not and deliver, you know, a deal score or an account health score. There’s some differences between these technologies.

But a simple way to think of it is analyzing interactions, and predicting what will actually close and how healthy your deals and accounts are. So when you are evaluating conversation and revenue intelligence partners avoid these four mistakes.

And the first is, don’t focus on features. Focus on pain points you are solving and simplifying workflows. The biggest mistake that I think people run into is they’re buying all these different sales technologies in silos. And as a former seller, that just takes time away from us being able to close deals. Your team has tool fatigue, they don’t want for 712 different places, they have to log in to get all the insights, training, and content they need to provide a better customer experience.

So when we think about sales reps, specifically, let’s think about some of the different things they need to be able to do with conversation and revenue intelligence insights:

  • Onboard and ramp faster
  • Better prepare for upcoming meetings without thinking
  • Get relevant coaching from their managers from their peers
  • Be able to self-coach
  • Share call snippets, transcripts, and mentions of competitors
  • Feedback on the product roadmap to share with other internal teams,
  • Know what content to send to a prospect or customer after an interaction
  • Easily and automatically update your CRM

So those are some of the top use cases. And of course, one is certainly using those deal and account health scores, to anticipate, which accounts you can grow to really understand those deal risks that might be deal blockers. But really put those people and those pain points first above those features.

Mistake number two, don’t just stop it insights: make insights actionable. Conversation and revenue intelligence are engines and their engines that need to ultimately power behavior change.

If you really want to maximize revenue growth and help your team win more. Insights only go so far right? We need to intelligently, as I mentioned, recommend content and training that’s going to help the rep work that deal or work that account better.

We need to give front-line managers tools to coach and sales enablement, teams, tools to bring in those best-in-class call examples, you know, to really train people. And a lot of times these these platforms are a really good way to measure the ROI of your enablement and your marketing efforts. So don’t just stop it insights make them actionable.

Tip number three, don’t just stop at the deal level. Think about the account-level view. A lot of products in this space just about deal coaching. They don’t factor in very complex enterprise, customized Salesforce instances or CRMs. They don’t let you manage multiple opportunities and ladder them up to a single account view.

But we are in the world of ABM marketing and ABM sales and you really need to give your team all the training content and insights they need to not just close deals but working grow accounts and that includes your CSM and your account growth roles, all of the GTM roles on your team. Right.

Tip number four: don’t undervalue the quality of professional services. Bookmaker rating en.bet-rate.top best bookmakers And so that always starts with looking at the background of the people who are going to support your digital transformation.

And as I mentioned, conversation and revenue intelligence are not going to be working in a silo. So look for people with those backgrounds, but also backgrounds and things like sales, content management, training, enablement – all of the different things that are going to be integrated together to use this insight.

Look at if the company you’re partnering with provides really in-depth customer enablement, user conferences training, and things to get you started with these technologies. Look for things like content-as-a-service. If you are going to go beyond just using the insights to actually chain people look for partners like that.

And most importantly, look at someone who has a really good track record of working with enterprise-size brands to keep compliant managing user permissions and access to things like call recordings and emails. It’s very, very critical that you use the right partner to maintain compliance and in addition, really start to reduce the number of tools your team that that’s a biggie now for chief compliance officers.

So those are my four tips just to repeat them. You know, don’t focus on features focus on people and pain points and the workflows that you’re putting in place really streamlining and simplifying things for them. Don’t just stop at insights, make them actionable. Don’t just stop at the deal level, consider that account level view, and finally do not undervalue the quality of professional services, particularly when it comes to compliance. So I’d love to hear your tips as well please drop them in the comments or feel free to reach out to me and thanks for listening.

Want to learn more about revenue intelligence? Check out more posts from Lindsey outlining what to look for and how to select a revenue intelligence solution.

7 Reasons Why Revenue Intelligence Is Your Forecasting Crystal Ball

Lindsey Plocek on November 14, 2022

If sales data consistently led to revenue insights, life would be easier. But after collecting and analyzing sales pipeline data, revenue leaders still struggle to accurately forecast sales.

Why? You need to be able to see into your company’s blind spots. You need to understand why your reps aren’t hitting their quotas. Otherwise, you’ll miss key opportunities to maximize revenue and drive growth.

Mindtickle 2022-2023 Sales Enablement Outlook Report

Revenue intelligence solutions are like a crystal ball. They help you understand the data stored in your CRM, see how your business is doing in real-time across all departments, and accurately predict future sales.

Keep reading to learn more about revenue intelligence and seven reasons why it could be the key to predicting your sales future.

  1. It checks (and reduces) deal risk
  2. It gives you 100% visibility
  3. It forecasts how many deals you’ll close in real time
  4. It tracks historical conversion rates
  5. It increases productivity across your teams
  6. It’s your one source of truth
  7. It reveals your overall business health

What is revenue intelligence?

Revenue intelligence is the collection and analysis of business data to understand the best processes and plays for consistently hitting your revenue goals. It has two key components: deal intelligence and forecast intelligence.

It reviews your calls, emails, meeting invitations, and the contacts associated with them. It looks at your Salesforce instance and the deal health and it shows you with high accuracy the deals that will close, the risks you must overcome,  and how far you are from hitting your numbers.

It gives you a single source of truth for the voice of customer insights in your go-to-market strategy. Not only does that help you measure performance across marketing, sales, and customer success, it helps you interpret and apply that data to improve products and marketing campaigns

Powered by artificial intelligence, revenue intelligence software helps you work smarter. Manual data collection is slow and often inaccurate. Revenue intelligence is able to capture and analyze data from all your go-to-market activities in a fraction of the time, and it eliminates human error. This saves revenue operations teams an average of 30 hours per week on manual work and helps them achieve 95%+ forecast accuracy.

Why is revenue intelligence important for sales teams?

Revenue growth depends on your ability to track deal health and accurately forecast revenue. Only then can you diagnose and improve your sales cadence.

It’s notoriously easy to resort to gut feelings and opinions when building your strategies. Revenue intelligence counters that inclination. It provides 100% visibility into what’s really happening on your sales calls and meetings.

Mindtickle, for example, scores every deal based on the contacts you’ve assigned to that opportunity. It then transcribes and analyzes conversations, giving you insights and key topics customers are talking about.

Your sales team has the information they need to close deals more quickly. That, in turn, helps sales leaders forecast sales more accurately.

It really is like having a crystal ball to gain key insights into what matters most. But there’s no magic here, just rich data and an intelligent system to show you how it impacts your bottom line.

Revenue intelligence helps you get a full picture of the present and read the future in seven important ways.

1. It checks (and reduces) deal risk

Revenue intelligence provides AI-powered risk analysis that helps your teams manage pipeline and close deals more effectively.

It identifies pipeline risks, so you know how to save a deal that’s not moving forward. For example, it can score every deal and alert you to elements that impact their health.

Take multithreading as an example. If you know it takes an average of 14 contacts to win a deal, and you don’t have enough people attached to a deal, revenue intelligence will identify that weakness.

Mindtickle Call AI revenue intelligence screenshot

Who’s involved in the deal? What are their engagement levels? Are they responding to emails? Is the customer sentiment trending negatively?

Without revenue intelligence, managers must trust the rep’s interpretation of deal progress and sentiment. But reps may be focused on one person who’s advocating internally for your solution while ignoring other signals that the deal is stalling.

2. It gives you 100% visibility

Revenue intelligence tracks all scheduled meetings, emails, calls, and what’s said in each channel. It captures sentiment and intent.

This is especially useful for managers because it gives context on how they can help a rep work that deal.

Mindtickle Revenue intelligence buyer engagement screenshot

Reps can easily become overconfident and report the deal is moving forward. Revenue intelligence can track these nuances to identify when a deal is at risk. It then helps you understand how to turn it around.

3. It forecasts how many deals you’ll close in real time

Revenue intelligence provides accurate forecasting information based on real-time data from reps’ engagement with prospects. It uses AI and ML to standardize your sales process, identify trends, and make projections.

Mindtickle revenue intelligence deal risk

Use it to show you where you’re experiencing revenue leakage and which deals are at risk in specific pipeline stages. Or use it for change analysis — where is revenue dipping over the last week or month?

Taking all of this data into account, revenue intelligence gives you an accurate account of how many deals will close and how far you are from hitting your numbers and pipeline goals.

4. It tracks historical conversion rates

Historical data puts current data into context, and revenue intelligence gives you historical conversion rates at the rep, team, and business levels.

Mindtickle revenue intelligence historical data

The data might tell you that Bill wins 7% of his deals while Susie wins 12% of her deals. With this information, you can evaluate your team’s strengths and weaknesses, what’s needed for them to hit their quota, and how you can help. This helps you proactively respond to gaps in your new pipeline.

5. It increases productivity across your teams

Revenue intelligence helps your teams work better and more effectively by helping them set priorities, and focus on the right prospects and sales activities.

Since it uses AI, it automatically collects data from every interaction your reps have with a prospect, including call recordings and emails. That lessens the burden of manual data, and frees your reps to focus on more productive activities: selling, knowledge building, training, and coaching.

Mindtickle Call AI scores screenshot

This improved data gives managers a more comprehensive understanding of how they can coach reps and help them move deals forward. It also helps you predict revenue growth based on your past deal flow.

6. It’s your one source of truth

To work effectively, your team needs all relevant information in a single place. Revenue intelligence software removes the frustration of having to log into multiple tools across multiple departments to gather essential revenue data.

By consolidating marketing, sales, and customer success data into one system, everyone has access to the same information. This reduces the need to reach out to different departments or manually crunch data from disparate sources.

Reps and managers can easily understand the status of deals, who’s involved on the customer side as well as internally, and whether reps are closing deals and hitting quotas.

Let’s say you use MEDDPICC as your sales methodology, and you want to ensure all reps are adhering to it. Revenue intelligence tracks your sales activities to ensure everyone is making the right motions. It predicts how teams and people are likely to perform in the future, who’s going to hit their quota, and who needs more training or coaching in a specific area.

How many leads are coming in from marketing? Who are you handing off new clients to for onboarding and support? All of this information is readily available with revenue intelligence.

7. It reveals your overall business health

Revenue intelligence gives you a real-time view of the health of your business at many levels. It doesn’t just process data, it interprets it, so you know the next steps, historical trends, and performance metrics that impact your decisions.

Revenue intelligence changes the game

Revenue intelligence is a powerful tool to help your organization drive growth and reach its potential. But it shouldn’t work alone. To set up your team for success, you need to combine sales readiness and revenue intelligence.

Mindtickle is the first platform to combine sales readiness and revenue intelligence in one place. That gives you higher data accuracy, easy user interface, more integrations, better customization, and a Readiness Index to predict how your teams are going to perform.

Use the Readiness Index to predict how teams and people are going to perform in the future, who’s going to hit their quota, and who needs more training or coaching in a specific area. That, plus revenue intelligence, gives you the insight you need to empower your entire revenue team.

You can check out all of this with a free, guided product tour and see for yourself how Mindtickle can maximize your revenue and grow your business.

Get free access to the best sales-readiness content.

© 2024 Mindtickle Inc. All rights reserved.