In today’s agile business environments we tend to find ourselves blessed with more and timely sales data than ever before. Where are our sales, who are the potential customers, what is driving their decisions, and are we hitting their mark. This data is clearly being collected and in many cases “In Real Time”, the big question is, can we see it and will we notice it in time to take advantage.
Massive amounts of data sources as I observed above can be absolutely great, but it is also a curse. We all know the adage of finding the needles in the haystack, but today it is more like finding the right needle in sleet storm of needles. Almost impossible to see the right ones in time and being wrong can hurt.
We have devised many ways to deal with this glut including making sure all the different kinds of data get grouped appropriately. Making sure all communications are collected and stored. We build graphs and charts to show us just how much we are making and we do set goals of which deals should be closing when.
Then comes the quarterly business review, the “oops post mortem analysis” where we tried to explain to ourselves and to our team what have failed. Many times there is not an easy answer ... we worked the account, we made the pitches, we quoted, and we even took the time to work the decision makers, influencers and even the detractors in the account. What could have gone wrong, and why did we miss it? Well, too often it is the speed of the deal or what we call the velocity of the deal.
Sales activities all have velocity of action, some appear to streak by to close, some feel more line molasses on a cold day but still close. It is important to note that while all sales opportunities have a velocity, it is the change in that velocity that is most telling in the validity of the forecast. An almost unnoticeable slowing the velocity of a deal can and usually does mean the potential cooling and high possibility to fail.
So how can you track the deal’s velocity? Well how do we humans perceive velocity? I guess you could say, it’s a visual thing. We are design to determine movement, speed, direction, and changes in any of those. We have trained ourselves to read numbers to give us indications of velocity, like the digital speedometers of the 70’s but people preferred the dial. Why, well a good friend of mine once told me why he didn’t like digital watches was because he was into spacial time. He makes a point. A dial speedometer not only allows us to see the velocity, but small movements of the needle indicate to us quickly minute changes in that velocity.
So how do we apply this spacial speed indication to our daily business? We need to see our deals movement over time. We need to see our key factors like the designated stages presented clearly, and most importantly we need to see in context to those events, activities of our team, our company actions to the account, and the accounts actions. At the business review we regularly will generate a condensed version to help identify where we lost the business. To keep from losing the business we need to identify those same indicators as they happen, alert ourselves and others to the problem and make the necessary correction.
This is exactly why we invented SFVision DealVelocity. Start using SFVision DV today, no configuration, just install and go to the DealVelocity Tab and see the movement of your deals like never before. Try now and get 10 days no charge to see for yourself.