4 Ways Accurate Sales Data Helps Generate Revenue

“Data is useful. High-quality, well-understood, auditable data is priceless.” – Ted Friedman, Gartner

What is inaccurate sales data costing you? 

Gartner says organizations have found that poor data quality is responsible for about $15 million per year in losses. 

And that’s just in enterprises that track the impact of bad data. Sixty percent of companies can’t even estimate their total losses because they don’t measure the effect of bad data in the first place. 

How does bad sales data impact your sales team?

In an enterprise sales team, here’s how bad data could be stalling your growth, or directly inhibiting your reps from hitting targets: 

• Deals lose momentum: it’s hard to figure out where each deal is at. What’s the right next step? Contacts and activites aren’t tracked, and you miss opportunities to build on engagement and move the deal over the finish line.
• Reps never improve: since reps don’t know what activity matters most, they take a “spray and pray” approach, or they simply keep doing what they’re doing – and it might not be working. 
• You don’t gain efficiency: you’re constantly looking backwards, trying to piece the puzzle together on what worked, but incorrect or missing data takes too long to find, and you’re unable to implement a better, more efficient sales process.

On the other hand, complete, accurate sales data can help you do these four things, which will directly impact your team’s performance.

How does accurate sales data help generate revenue?

• By running a more effective sales process
• Keeps reps focused on selling
• Enables sales teams to make performance decisions faster
• Helps your whole team execute more effectively

#1: Run a more effective sales process 

One in five sales professionals reports that the top reason prospects back out of deals is the length of the sales process.

What does your current sales process look like – from the moment your team makes contact with a prospect, to the point they become a customer? Chances are if you look at every step on that journey, you’re going to find gaps, or ways you can make the experience better. 

A focus on efficiency is key – one-third of every sales professionals’ top goal in 2023 is to make their sales process more efficient, where every touchpoint is building momentum towards the finish line of closing a deal.

If this is your goal, you’ve probably thought, “I wish I knew exactly what each rep should be doing, and when.” That’s the only way you’re going to be able to see where you can make efficiency gains. 

It starts with identifying who is doing what. Too often, revenue leaders have to rely on reps to report whether or not a certain action was completed to move a deal forward. With a 100% accurate CRM, you no longer have this issue. 

And when you’re able to see precisely who’s doing what, you can also see the leading indicators of success, you can adjust your sales process as needed.

If you’re able to constantly iterate on your sales process, testing rep behaviors that influence revenue, you’re able to directly impact revenue – faster. 

#2: Keep reps focused on selling, not data-entry 

Without quality sales data, your reps have no choice – they need to hunt down the right contacts and spend time updating the CRM. 

If you invest in a sales activity capture automation solution, your reps can spend more time on what matters. Salesforce reports reps only spend 28% of their week actually selling. An easy way to affect the pipeline? Get your reps back to doing what they’re good at. 

Reps agree – 25% of sales reps said updating the CRM frequently takes time away from selling, and 95% said they’d be more likely to hit quota if they spent less time on non-revenue generating activities (Dooly). 

#3: Make performance decisions faster 

Did you know that only 3% of sales teams have 75% or more of their reps hitting quota in the past 12 months? 

A team with only a few top performers hitting quota means a vast majority of your reps are only middle performers – and your goal should be to raise that bar. 

But with a sales process and rep grading system based on manual CRM data entry (resulting in low quality data), it takes a long time to figure out which reps need more coaching. With SetSail, Extreme Networks was able to see in real-time who was doing what and if rep activity was producing the right results. With factual evidence to back up individual activity and overall performance outcomes, Extreme Networks’ sales team made revenue-driving performance improvements across their team. 

Forty-two percent of sales reps take 10 months or longer to become productive enough to help the company meet its revenue goals – and that’s a long time to wait to make performance decisions. 

You can ramp reps faster, coach where it counts, and raise the bar for your entire team when you have clear, up-to-date, quality sales activity data. 

#4: Do your best work 

Bad data means bad execution, and subpar results. Eighty-five percent of sellers reported they lost or delayed at least one deal in the past year due to a key client stakeholder changing jobs. 

Data quality must be constantly maintained, and it’s the glue that holds your go-to-market team together, allowing you to orchestrate a pipeline process that wins

Forrester reports that companies able to align people, processes and technology across sales and marketing achieved 36% more revenue growth and up to 28% more profitability. 

Good data helps you do your best work. 

Data without analysis isn’t enough 

Getting the data accurate is step one. Turning the data into action is where you’ll see the tangible impact on your bottom line. 

That’s why you should use SetSail to:

1. Automatically update Salesforce and your analytics tools with sales data from across your go-to-market stack.
2. Analyze the data to discover the signals that lead to more revenue.
3. Improve your sales process and focus rep activity on what wins. 

See it in action – book a quick demo.

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