tions within data sets from several sources. Users can thus learn about relationships that affect sales in ways they did not even suspect. The tool also allows users to interrogate data, finding out, for example, how much was sold to a particular customer in a given quarter.


Qlik has been used successfully in business-to-consumer (B2C) markets, such as banking and gaming. It also helped networking-systems giant Cisco dramatically improve customer care for a revenue gain of $100 million and a cost savings of $4 million.


USING INTERNAL DATA TO IMPROVE THE SALES PROCESS Peter Ostrow, research group director in sales effective- ness for Aberdeen Group, emphasizes analyzing data, including all that data now available to customers: “Buyers now have more data and the ability to use it than you do, and so may your rivals,” he stresses, so for salespeople, big-data analytics is a way to regain power by understand- ing buyer behavior.


The first step in using analytics was to improve sales


forecasts, which enabled better rep management and co- ordination with other departments, such as supply chains, production, human resources, and customer care. “The entire company gains if the sales department can provide more accurate sales forecasts,” Ostrow notes. The second step was using predictive analytics, from firms such as Cognos and Tableau, which offered business intelligence on what deals were most likely to close, how reps could influence them, and how managers should guide reps to close them. Now, Ostrow says, the move is toward prescriptive analytics that guides training, coaching, and use of sales tools and determines whom to approach and how. For example, a rep predicts a deal will close May 1 for $40,000, but a reliable application predicts closure on June 15 for $20,000 because the rep has not taken an es- sential step or gathered critical intelligence. In this example, analytics serves to train and coach reps, as well as predict. Ostrow doesn’t doubt that reps will use predictive ana- lytics solutions. “Reps like data now if the interface is good and they do not need instructions, because a wizard takes them through [the application] and visualization tools make it easy,” he says. “Reps are not dumb; they have necessarily short attention spans.” The Aberdeen researcher is talking about using internal company data, not external data, to guide reps in selling, and he believes the most helpful systems are designed by experienced salespeople, not information technology (IT) experts trying to assist reps. “Effective applications help salespeople, rather than report on salespeople to C-suite execs on the golf course.” Ostrow acknowledges that some big-data tools use confidential external data gleaned from Web crawlers or


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We track more than a hundred key performance indicators that correlate with high performance.


secured from unverified sources, but he cautions that com- panies have to be transparent now and thus should use only data that they are willing to acknowledge using. With that ideal in mind, Ostrow sees the best tools as exploiting internal company data for sales enablement. VoloMetrix exploits internal data to improve sales. For four years, it has provided a people-analytics platform, and for the last year it has used this platform to find out how salespeople spend their time. The tool learns to whom reps talk, at each customer and internally at their own firm. It gets its data from calendars, email, CRM systems, and human resources. The aim is not to track individual reps, so the data is kept anonymous, but it is correlated with quota attainment and size of deals to determine what be- havior is most effective and thus improve the sales process through tools, training, managing, and coaching. “We track more than a hundred key performance indica- tors that correlate with high performance,” says VoloMetrix chief executive officer Ryan Fuller. Prominent indicators are time spent with customers, number of customer contacts, and number and identities of internal-support contacts. The anonymized data yields significant patterns.


VoloMetrix staff can do the analysis or train client staff to do it. In a way, the analysis is akin to having an expensive consulting firm come into your organization and analyze the behavior of top reps to improve the sales process. VoloMetrix’s software, however, tracks everybody’s be- havior in real time and will continue to do it long after a consultant would have concluded his or her analysis. Fuller estimates that the approach can account for 20 hours per week of the average rep’s time and 30 to 70 hours a week of managers’ time.


BIG DATA ON YOUR CUSTOMERS’ CUSTOMERS Bill Franks is chief analytics officer at Teradata, and the au- thor of Taming the Big Data Tidalwave: Finding Oppor- tunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics and The Analytics Revolution: How to Improve Your Business By Making Analytics Operational in the Big Data Era. Franks says most B2B firms do not really have the massive volume of data on customers that B2C firms have, but they still need to analyze what they do have in transactions, Web logs, and social media. Moreover, B2B data challenges can become massive if they try to sell by knowing their customers’ customers bet-


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