Episode Summary
Data-driven teams use company-wide data insights to identify, advance, and achieve their business goals. And using data, you can have insight into how your employees operate daily.
But inaccurate data can be a big problem that can lead to bad business decisions and negative business performance. Also, incorrect data can lead to a drop in productivity because everyone — sales, marketing, customer support, etc. — uses the same data.
According to Stephanie Sanders, it’s important to take action if data seems inaccurate and collaborate with others to get their perspective. “It’s always about communication. It’s always about being open to other perspectives and ways of looking at the same slice of the pie and then using that to help progress your agenda and everything else in the next situation,” says Stephanie.
In this episode of Taking the Lead, Stephanie explains how you can use data as a diagnostic and to make decisions. Stephanie and our host Christina Brady discuss the importance of being open to other perspectives when analyzing data, data usage in the sales funnel, and wrong data.
Guest Profile
- Name: Stephanie Sanders
- What she does: Stephanie is the head of sales for the Americas at Contractbook.
- Company: Contractbook
- Noteworthy: Stephanie is a sales leader with over a decade of experience. She majored in marketing in college and got a BBA degree. She interviewed for several roles — consulting, marketing, and sales — and eventually landed a job at Vorsight. Stephanie realized that she really enjoyed the sales process, and her next job was at Brightcove. Ever since then, she's been at different high-growth startups, helping them scale and putting a little bit of strategy into place with the teams. Finally, she joined Contractbook, where she is the head of sales.
Key Insights
- Data is diagnostic. If you're a leader, you should understand your team, their mistakes, and why things go wrong. Everyone manages a team differently, and Stephanie says that the data helps her diagnose what she needs to focus on. "I don't think I would want to be in a position if things were so much outside of my control. And I think that data and metrics and all of that is the best, objective way to look at anything like that because it compares apples to apples; it allows you to select very specific parts of your sales process throughout the full sales funnel. […] It's just a way of being able to tell where people are versus where they should be and then get specific with coaching and training for those areas that are showing weakness."
- Data usage is less as you go down the sales funnel. A sales funnel or revenue funnel refers to the buying process companies take customers through when purchasing a product. Stephanie outlines three different areas of the funnel — top of the funnel, mid-funnel, and late stage — and notes that the most significant focus on data is at the top of the funnel. "Top of funnel, it's pretty common, especially looking at the daily activities, calls, emails, social touches, and all of that at this point. So, there, it's very normal and very accepted. It probably happens a little bit less as you go down the funnel. So, for mid-stages, I think people still pay a lot of attention to discovering the op and op; however, you classify your stages and that kind of stuff. But then, because it does get a little trickier towards the later stages of the sales cycle, it becomes so much more specific to the prospect and their buying decision, and other stuff that starts to get outside of your control; it becomes a little less."
- Be open to other perceptions. When analyzing data for a certain period, leaders will often not like what they see or the decision they should make based on it. Also, working with a cross-functional partner can be challenging because you don't look at the data the same way. According to Stephanie, open communication is the most important thing in decision-making. "The most important thing approaching any of those situations is going into it with an open mind because maybe there is something that they see that you're blinded by because you're too close to the situation sometimes. Or maybe the way they're interpreting the numbers, and everything is the right way to look at it. And so I think you have to be open to that conversation. And at the end of the day, it's like, 'Select what we're doing. This isn't the end of the world; it's not life or death. We're not curing cancer.' What's more important at the end of it is being able to continue those collaborations and relationships with the people that you work with."
Episode Highlights
Using Data to Make Decisions
“The first part is just knowing the steps that need to be happening and where; that’s part of the process. And the thing with measuring any of this, unfortunately, is a little bit retroactive in certain instances. We don’t do QBR or anything to that extent here yet, but I do like to sit down with the team at the beginning of a new quarter and look at everything that happened in the previous quarter. Not so much as a way to dwell on the past, but it’s like when you look at something with that more bird’s eye view, a lot of times there are patterns and things that emerge that you don’t see when you’re looking at it on a deal-by-deal level. […]
Just being able to experiment and being able to compare, ‘This is what we saw over this period versus these are the changes we made and what we saw through this period.’ It really helps us understand how things are moving and what’s impacting the overall performance.”
What If the Data Is Wrong?
“I’m not saying we have any issues with this at Contractbook, but sometimes there’s a little tension between marketing and sales. And I think, here, we do a really good job of avoiding that. But we were in a meeting, presenting the numbers over a certain period, and it was one of those things I was looking at, and I was like, ‘That can’t be right; that just cannot be the right number.’ And I am very direct; I probably should have just held that to myself until the meeting was over and talked separately to that person, but I think the good part to come out of it was that I raised the concern, and I said, ‘I’d really like to look at this with you. Can you show me where you pulled this from?’ And then, I met with that person separately, and we realized there was an error. And so, to me, there was no question the next time because we had looked at it together, we’d worked on it together, and we’d found where the error was coming from. […]
People want to know why. They want to have that explanation if something’s different than what it’s been or what they think it should be, the reasoning behind it, what’s happened, and what’s going to be done to prevent it from happening again in the future.”
Sales Leader Partners
“RevOps, that’s the given, but actually within our organization, we have a data team as well that is under RevOps, and that is something that I haven’t had the luxury of having at previous jobs, which is really helpful.
For a company that is the size we are — we’re like 130 to 140 employees — we have a RevOps function, we have sales ops, we have marketing ops, and we have business ops. We’ve got a lot of resources there that I haven’t had at other companies with the same employee count. So, that helps a lot. Otherwise, previously it’s been more so a function of sometimes even finance or operations, in general, being the ones that house that type of information. But I think most sales leaders are going to rely the most heavily on RevOps or sales ops, which is tough because they’re so busy.”
