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In a data-driven culture you are held accountable for the results you produce. For a VP of Sales this means guiding your team to the monthly quota. Leads are important for building up your team’s sales funnel, but opportunities in the closing stages become the priority at the end of the month. In 3 steps we …

I love Brad Feld’s blog and have learned a ton from it over the years. He’s also done me a huge favor in the past, speaking at a talk I organized at my old company. But this past weekend, I found myself significantly disagreeing with Brad for probably the first time. Here’s a hurricane delayed …

There is a world of metrics available to you as a sales leader for measuring your sales team. You might have infinite appetite for metrics in order to analyze your team’s performance. Yet it is critical that you limit the number of metrics that you use incorporate into your salesforce reporting since your reps and …

The sales funnel. The opportunity funnel. By either name, the funnel is a classic metaphor used by sales leaders. It is powerful because it provides a physical image for understanding and visualizing abstract data. It tracks the sales process, step by step. It is insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your team and how they …

Here at InsightSquared we stress that sales leaders should measure their team using Salesforce.com data, but it’s important to understand why you are tracking these metrics. You then need to determine whether your metrics effectively meet their purpose. Trish Bertuzzi, President and Chief Strategist of The Bridge Group, Inc., brought up a powerful point in a recent …

One thing I love asking sales leaders is “Do you know how long your sales cycle is?” The exchange usually goes something like this: “How long is your sales cycle? Do you know?” “Oh sure, it’s typically a 6 month cycle.” “How do you know?” “Well, there’s a 1 month trial and it usually takes …

At InsightSquared we are passionate about two things: small businesses and analytics. So it should come as no surprise that when the small business blog at the nytimes.com published a post on dashboards by Josh Patrick, we were definitely going to devour it. The post made the rounds in our office yesterday. Go check out the article …