Industry-leading Companies Use Analytics to Beat the Competition

From a study/paper/book by Thomas H. Davenport called “Competing on Analytics”, an excerpt of the subject matter provides an idea of the ways that analytics and intelligence are being used in business processes, including the sales process:

“Companies questing for killer apps generally focus all their firepower on the one area that promises to create the greatest competitive advantage. But a new breed of organization has upped the stakes: Amazon, Harrah's, Capital One, and the Boston Red Sox have all dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities. At a time when firms in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technologies, business processes are among the few remaining points of differentiation--and analytics competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes. Employees hired for their expertise with numbers or trained to recognize their importance are armed with the best evidence and the best quantitative tools. As a result, they make the best decisions.” (Buy the report here)

In sales, these analytics can start with reports and dashboards in the SFA, but these simply scratch the surface. Much like the New England Patriots use world-class analytics to predict the behavior of the competition in thousands of scenarios, sales management can increase their chances of being effective by studying dozens of variables that lead to success.

These variables range from optimal employee personality, competitor value propositions, client needs over time and current level of sales skills. And, of course, there are so many variables in-between.

What kind of power would you have at your disposal if you could say, “In light of the fact that our prospect is evaluating us against competitor x, we need to say these things, structure the deal like this and enlist the help of these three sales professionals to close this deal. If we do these things, we’ll increase our odds by 47%”?

It is possible to do this, but this level of analytics does not usually seem of interest to most people in the sales management role. While there is an element of mystics art to successful selling, selling is a process and a process can be optimized. And since sales lives in a continually changing world, that optimization has to be conducted continually.