ANLY482 AY2016-17 T1 Group6/Project Overview
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While much has been explored in the field of Sales Analytics, a quick search reveals that few companies have delved into the area of Sales People Analytics. Deloitte found that almost 70% of companies felt they were weak in using HR data to predict workforce performance and improvement3.
Conventional wisdom tells us there are several ways to evaluate a salesperson’s performance, such as the size of his external network and his sales figures. New research say this is an oversimplification of sales practices. Steward et al. (2010) found that higher-performing salespeople regularly activated their internal company networks to coordinate a team of experts tailored to serve a particular customer4. Purely focusing on sales figures as an indicator of performance also neglects the time aspect. Sometimes long-term projects take months to realize revenues. Harvard Business Review also found that spending time with both internal and external connections contributed to success in selling5.
We aim to assist TrustSphere in developing a dashboard for evaluating salesperson effectiveness.
With access to TrustSphere’s data, we aim to understand the following:
1) Salespeople Networks
Aspects of a salesperson’s network can tell us how effective they are. The extent of a salesperson’s influence would likely affect his performance. Likewise, collaboration with colleagues reflects both formal and informal information exchange and is likely to affect how well he does his job.
2) Other sales-related metrics
We will also consider other factors not covered in the social network analysis. For instance, does the salesperson have significantly more ties with customer/prospects in a certain sector? How long on average does the salesperson take to respond to a customer’s email?
3 http://dupress.com/articles/people-and-hr-analytics-human-capital-trends-2015/
4 Steward, M. D., Walker, B. A., Hutt, M. D., & Kumar, A. (2010). The coordination strategies of high-performing salespeople: Internal working relationships that drive success. Academy of Marketing Science.Journal, 38(5), 550-566. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11747-009-0170-0
5 https://hbr.org/2014/08/3-behaviors-that-drive-successful-salespeople
