The document discusses how technology is changing the sales process and requiring a more data-driven, quantitative approach. It argues that to be successful, companies need to understand key metrics like the number of calls or activities required to connect with prospects, convert connections to meetings, and convert meetings to opportunities. This "math of sales" can be used to more accurately forecast pipeline and revenue, optimize staffing and resource allocation, and reduce money left on the table. It promotes a tool called Salesvue that integrates with CRMs to provide real-time analytics on sales activities and help companies determine these important numbers to guide their prospecting and sales strategies.

1. 3
8
0
8
1
9
7
7
7
6
9
5
3
8
2
3
100
9
6100
0
53 7
THE MATH OF SALES

2. Technology is changing the process of selling. As video conferencing and web
demonstration services become more affordable and reliable, not only is it possible to
engage with clients and potential clients virtually, it’s often becoming a preferred method
by consumers. Busy schedules and the ability to access information more readily means
consumers with less time and less interest in scheduling face-to-face meetings to learn
about a company’s product or services. As a result, many sales organizations are
experiencing a shift in their sales approach. They are spending more time in virtual
engagements, tracking correspondence to keep with consistent follow-up, and creating
more big data on customers and prospects than ever before. Many could say that the ‘art
of the sell’ (while still important) is merging with the importance of measurement, or in
other words - the math of calculated selling.
Yes, uncovering exact numbers for how to prospect effectively to build pipeline will
provide sales organizations with the information they need to understand their revenue
strategy. Unfortunately, while most Sales CRM’s today provide a platform for storing the
above information, abstracting real-time data is a challenge for most. By the time reports
are built and anecdotes are taken, data has changed in real-time, leaving companies to
build pipeline strategies based on educated guesses.
All of this data creates a new opportunity to use real-time analytics for building a
measured, calculated approach to driving revenue faster. By answering the below three
questions with real-time, quantitative data, organizations could answer age-old questions
surrounding forecasting, staffing and company strategy:
?How many calls does it take to connect to a prospect
How many connections will convert into an appointment or meeting
How many conversions will turn into an opportunity
?
?
THE ART OF SELLING IS CHANGING RAPIDLY

3. 8 IS NOT THE MAGIC NUMBER
Connecting with new potential buyers requires understanding the math of sales. One
well-touted industry “average” touts eight calls are required to connect with a prospect.1
Don’t be fooled into thinking that number has any relevance to your business. Industry
averages don’t actually exist as reality. As you know, an average is revealed by adding all
the respondent data and dividing by the number of respondents. To get “eight” as an
average, respondent surveys had to have more than eight and less than eight calls as their
best guess to connect.
At Salesvue, our inside sales team makes the majority of its connections on call number
twelve. What’s your company’s number? It’s important to know. According to the same
industry survey, most inside sales teams give up after three attempts. While that number
also isn’t relevant to your own business, it does signal the alarm. If your number is nine and
ninety percent of your team is giving up before call number nine, how much business are
you leaving on the table?
We know the answer for our business:
More than 25% of our revenue would never have happened if we didn’t push our
inside team to make call number 12.
No doubt, there is a technique to good selling. Finessing
deals, interacting with customers, reading buying signals, and
evoking sales, are indeed, an art form quantified by the ability
to hit the “number.”
However, at the prospecting stage of the sales cycle, the
finesse of the deal becomes less of a priority. In its place is the
math of prospecting—connecting is purely a numbers game.
In other words, every company’s magic number is different and industry averages
have no relevance to individual companies.

4. 100
Using the ROI calculator on www.salesvue.com you can find out how much money
you’re likely losing. For instance, a company with just 5 account managers executing 40
activities per day to sell a product with a $15,000 average deal size is leaving $645,000
on the table. Rather than closing $1.515 million dollars in year, the company is realizing
only $840,000 in topline revenue.2
THE MATH OF SALES
Every sales cycle begins with identifying potential buyers and moving these prospects
through a sales funnel. Too often, however, the strategy for reaching a targeted list of new
potential buyers lacks the backing of any quantitative data. How to reach new prospects
and move them towards an opportunity stage is often based on predictive analysis over
empirical data. This leaves the crucial part of building a company’s pipeline to be based
on nothing but estimated guesses and comparison industry averages.
The approach for forecasting and building pipelines needs to be based on quantifiable
data that can be repeated. When following this approach, much more than forecasting
becomes possible.
Adopting the math of sales provides a quantitative-based strategy to prospecting and
building pipeline .
Math by Example
7
3
5
75
20
8
6
20
3 32
The magic formula for sales is:

5. Activities
Conversation rate (%)
Scheduled Appointment rate (%)
Opportunity Conversion rate (%)
Deal win rate (%)
Math of Sales Formula
Most sales leaders focus only on the letters “O” and “W” and neglect the very important
variables that drive the funnel because those other variables remain a mystery and are
hard to come by. By beginning with the activities needed to close one single deal, the
latter stages of the cycle become more predictable and meaningful.
Using the formula above, let’s assume we have a way to uncover the data for each stage
of the sales process.
C
S
O
W
A
For most companies, the above formula is moot because variable data is missing. That
doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. To the contrary, every company has the numbers needed to
do this math, the numbers simply remain hidden and extremely hard to unearth from the
depths of any CRM system in use today. More often, companies are lacking the visibility
needed to know how many activities their sales representatives manage on a daily basis
for prospecting and how many activities it takes to connect with a new potential buyer.
To our knowledge, the only tool that goes into this much detail is our own—Salesvue. We’ll
talk more about it later. Let’s first look at use cases beyond forecasting the time it will take
to reach a TAM.
Know Your Numbers

6. USE CASES FOR THE MATH OF SALES
Answering the age-old questions discussed earlier in this white
paper is a primary output of the Math of Sales. By knowing your
number you can:
Forecast More Accurately
This is the by far the most common and obvious use case. In the example above,
1,000 new opportunities could be forecasted with some legitimate predictability.
That batch of opportunities is due to come in within 80 days. At an opportunity to
conversion rate of 30%, that equates to 300 new customers (based on the sales
cycle).
Take Money off the Table
Because most companies don’t know the values to assign to the formula, their
teams are stopping well shy of the activity volume necessary to reach a B2B
customer. With the appropriate tool, all reps can be placed on a cadence of
activities that boosts connections and conversions, which drives sales
incremental to what was occurring previously. In some cases, incremental
revenue has reached over 30 percent.
Scale Your Staff and Your Business (and in that order)
Using the above use case, it took 80 days to reach 10,000 prospects. To reach
the same market in 40 days, the sales team or the daily production values
need to double. Several Salesvue customers use this data to build short and
long-term staffing plans.
Understand the True Cost of Downtime
When the activities are directly associated with revenue, by default it is easy to
calculate the opportunity loss associated with lowering activity volume. There
are many reasons activity volume is reduced. Company outings, layoffs, sick
employees, holidays and training are among the many reasons rep output can
be dwindle.
Reduce activity volume by 10 percent and, based on the example above, there will be one
less sale. What’s the cost of that sale?

7. HOW TO KNOW YOUR NUMBERS
The only way to really know your numbers is to use a tool that dynamically provides
deep-dive sales business intelligence and bolts on directly to the CRM system your sales
teamis using.
Salesvue does just that. Salesvue reduces the number of clicks it takes to make a call in
Salesforce.com from twelve to just two, giving an immediate efficiency increase of 600%.
It then wraps process around standard CRM objects to help automate the inside sales
function and provide the best fine-grain business analytics in the industry. These
analytics reveal your company’s magic numbers quickly and easily.
Integrated as a native Salesforce.com application, Salesvue provides real-time data on
sales activities, metrics on connections to new prospects and progress reports against
targeted lists and assigned activities. Figure 1 below illustrates a dashboard showing
performance among team members, providing you with the numbers you need.
Additionally, Salesvue provides detailed plans for reaching new potential buyers based
on more than 100,000 aggregate calling hours amongst dozens of industries. Your
prospects are then added to the plan of your choice (or one of your own making). Sales
team members don’t have to worry about what activities to accomplish each day as
Salesvue presents them in any easy-to-use single pane in your Salesforce instance. In this
scenario, prospecting becomes very strategic and measurable.
Add an average sales price into the mix and Salesvue presents activity results in dollar
values, which eliminates guesswork.

8. MAKE YOUR TEAM HAPPIER, TOO
Because it takes just two clicks to log an activity with Salesvue versus twelve with
native Salesforce.com, your sales team will adopt Salesvue with little—if
any—pushback.
Figure 2 presents the single pane interface your team will use to quickly and
easily load up a plan with all the contacts (left pane), log the resolution and move
on to the next call.

9. CONCLUSION
As the selling landscape continues to evolve, prospecting will become more arduous
every year. The only way to remain competitive is to compliment the art of selling with a
front-end process based on the math of selling.
PERQ, a firm that manages marketing for automotive companies, implemented Salesvue
first into its customer on-boarding process. After success there, the use case expanded
into sales. The company reports a remarkable 500% percent increase in conversions and
attributes Salesvue with its success.
PERQ isn’t the only company to experience significant boosts to conversions and,
ultimately, incremental revenue.
Isn’t it time for your company to unearth its secret numbers? Try Salesvue for thirty days
and discover how knowing your numbers will help you reach your sales quotas faster.
http://bit.ly/SVtrial
1 Corporate Executive Study 2012, Connect and Sell 2012 & IBM Buyer Performance Study 2011.
2 http://salesvue.com/roi-calculator/
1311 W. 96th Street, Suite #100, Indianapolis, IN 46260
Phone: 317.644.2477
E-mail: Sales@salesvue.com
www.salesvue.com
@salesvue