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Is your CRM lacking contact and activity data? Are you in the dark about the progress of your opportunities? And finally, does your sales team spend most of their precious time manually entering activity data into Salesforce? If your answer to all of these is a yes, read on.
Why you need sales activity data
There’s a meme somewhere on the internet that says: We are not micromanaging you. Just tell us how many things you do in a day, how many times you do them, and how long it takes. Let’s face it. Activity data – emails, calls, meetings with a customer – is how you know your business is moving forward. It’s how you know where the deals are and if they will close. You want first-party data on your opportunities. And that activity data can be a window to where your pipeline really is.
What you can do with activity data
There are things that you can do with the activity data, and there are things that the system can. Of course, you personally can use your sales team’s activity data to dig deeper into every deal to understand what’s going on. In a world where everything changes by the minute and trends of COVID followed by sporadic shutdown orders throw your accounts into disarray, you need that kind of a continuous temperature check on your business. Just like in the video above, you can explore and see a full picture of all the interactions per account. But there’s a whole set of things that a software platform, running an impressive stack of AI, can do with that data too. And that’s where the future lies (read more below).
How to capture more activity data
When inheriting a sales team (along with a CRM), you as a sales leader or an operations leader are faced with a choice: take on a whole new hygiene project to clean and enrich the data or just focus on sales programs and skills. Doing the latter only is a costly endeavor, especially if you are in a high growth business. Today, data, digitally captured, is everything. The question that you must quickly answer is how. And the answer to that is by having a continuously adapting activity capture solution in place. Not a one-time data cleaning tool, nor a process for manual data entry.
The challenges of your data model
The reason you need a continuously adapting activity capture solution is that your data model is always evolving. As an example, the relationships between accounts and opportunities change; territories, verticals, and market segments evolve. There isn’t a clean mapping between activities of an account in relation to a sales rep and to the opportunity where there are multiple reps working the opportunity. All of that needs to be accounted for in the logic that you are putting in to continuously capture the activity data.
The looming questions of privacy and trust
Of course, there’s also the question of ‘If I’m capturing everything my customer is telling me and writing me, how can I ensure I’m compliant with privacy rules?’ or ‘How can I control what gets captured from my email and what personal non-relevant data isn’t synced back between my systems?’ All of these are complex questions that need to be addressed in your evaluation of the data capture solution.
A bigger vision for activity data
By now, you have probably realized that you need a secure, adaptable, and clean way to automatically capture sales activity data from any source and bring it to your CRM. But quite frankly, for SetSail, the creation of an advanced activity capture solution was just a necessity. SetSail Collect, our solution that helps enrich your sales data, was built as simply a pre-requisite to a much bigger vision: deriving real-time buying signals and augmenting sales behavior using AI. SetSail’s buying signals and behaviors platform ushers us into a whole new age of sales productivity. But more on that in our upcoming posts.
About me
I joined SetSail from Salesforce where I led product marketing for a portfolio of 50+ AI products.
To learn more about our vision, Contact Us on our website, or feel free to tweet me @crsaygun.
