As a data geek who’s recently switched careers into sales, I can’t help but think about analytics in my new role as a Lead Gen Rep. To me data is crucial in understanding what’s effective and what’s not. So, I decided to be really diligent about keeping track of everything I do on a daily basis: number of emails, phone calls (and type of phone calls). The purpose being, of course, to be able to analyze what I am doing and to be able to compare my activity data with my outcomes data (how many leads flipped to Sales, how many opportunities identified, etc).
Now that I’ve been with the company for almost 7 months, I thought I’d share the activity dataset. In the graph below, you’ll see the following stats for each day (outbound and inbound activity):
- Email: how many email I wrote,
- Call – No Message: how many calls I made in which no one picked up and I didn’t leave a message,
- Call – Left Message: how messages I left,
- Call – With: how many meaningful conversations I’ve had about whether it’s an opp or not
- Call: All other types of calls (getting to the right person).
You’ll also see that during the course of the last 7 months, I’ve switched strategies in how I approach my job, twice. The first few months, my strategy was to get a hold of someone, no matter how many calls it took. I also didn’t leave any messages, because I thought it would be a waste of time (people almost never call back).
After about two months of relentless calling (and following the advice of my manager), I switched tactics, and started leaving voice messages every time I called someone for the first time. I also tightened my “abandon” criteria – meaning I stopped hounding people until they answered the phone – I would call, leave a message, follow up by email and be done with it.
Tracking daily activity in Sales
By tightening the abandon criteria, I can reach out to a lot more people, and by leaving a message, hope for a better chance that they will notice my outreach.
And the most recent change in strategy (after I got back from vacation) was prompted on my own, with the realization that my goal should be to maximize the number of people I reach out to everyday. With the help of a lot of email templates, I can now send out a lot more email per day, and call to leave a message only to the most promising prospects.
Notice that there is a crucial piece of data missing above. I left out the outcomes data on purpose. The data above is real, and I don’t want to in anyway compromise my current employer’s competitive status by revealing too much information.
What do you think? Have you been able to extract useful strategic information by analyzing daily sales tasks data?
2 Comments
I am wondering if you keep track of the people who you don’t ever hear back from and loop back around 3-6 months later. The reason I ask is that there is something to be said for the subliminal activity that goes on when someone recognizes a name. By leaving a message and an email, even though they don’t call back, you are leaving a small crumb of who you are and who your company is in their heads. Then, when you loop back they think that someone told them about you or they recognize you and don’t know why, this can go along way for making the sale where there was not one before.
I once saw a study (which I cannot find of course) that said that American males have to be exposed to the same product 5-10 times before they go from ignoring the ad to paying attention to genuine interest and the possibility of buying it. In some cases, this mass exposure is enough to convince them (us) to make an impulse buy on products off the shelf. It is a little different for software and services, but the concept holds. If you can expose people to a product in a friendly, unassuming way and feed them facts/statistics about the product at some point they start to own that data and will want to buy. I don’t know about you, but I do this constantly whether I mean to or not. Taco Bell will get me EVERY TIME with their incessent advertising campaigns, all of a sudden i am craving a .
Matt, that’s a good point. The activity shown in this post is in addition to all of the direct outreach done once/quarter/lead in the CRM. I didn’t count the emails sent out by the campaign management system because that’s whole different ROI calculation (effectiveness of unsolicited email campaigns), and because it’s something that’s going on in the background, and doesn’t directly dictate how I should be spending my time.