ANLY482 AY2016-17 T1 Group6/Project Overview

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Project Overview

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Scope

The research points we would like to address include:

1. Uncovering Insights into Network and Sales performance
   • Develop a measure to evaluate the quality of internal and external relationships formed, possibly using recency, frequency, TrustScore etc.
   • Discover opportunities through text analysis on salespeople’s email headers and placing them into an appropriate sales cycle

E.g. For Salesperson A, 50% of emails about closing, 20% about meetings

1. Analysing the Sales Team’s Internal Network
   • Analysing salespeople interactions with various other departments e.g. marketing
   • Deriving a collaboration score to observe how salespeople activate their internal connections to serve an account.
   • Deriving a salesperson’s influencer score within the organization using eigenvector centrality. This will include factors such as Hierarchy, Number of Ties, Strength of Ties to other influential people within the organization
   • Tracking a salesperson’s network trajectory i.e. how a salesperson’s internal network changes over time

1. Analysing the Sales Team’s External Network
   • Identifying internal clusters in which salespeople communicate.
   • Deriving a collaboration score to observe how sales people activate their internal connections to serve an account.
   • Deriving a salesperson’s influencer score within the organization using eigenvector centrality. This will include factors such as Hierarchy, Number of Ties, Strength of Ties to other influential people within the organization
2. Analysing the Sales Team’s External Network
   • Developing a measure to identify hot and cold relationships between salespeople and external parties.
   • Identifying which client sectors do salespeople communicate in? (Eg. Healthcare, Education, Government etc.)
   • Analysing direction of emails and response time with external parties.
   • Discover opportunities through emails subject headers and placing them into an appropriate sales cycle e.g. for one salesperson, 50% of emails are about closing, 20% are about meetings.

Motivation

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.

Therefore, we aim to assist TrustSphere in developing a dashboard for evaluating salesperson effectiveness based on their relationship data.

Objectives

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?

Data

1. Daily email communication data
2. Unique email relationship metrics of each sales employee
3. TrustSphere Staff List

Review of Previous Work

Methodology

Data Preparation for Social Network Analysis

Looking Ahead

References

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