How to Use Sales Data to Compete With Your Past Self

Competitiveness is a primary attribute that successful salespeople share.

Selling Power, a leading magazine for sales managers and sales executives since 1981, has published interesting research about whether sales people were born competitive by surveying 254 sales professionals across the United States and United Kingdom. 

The results showed that a salesperson’s personality and subsequent career may very well be decided from an early age. “Competitiveness” was listed as a principal childhood characteristic, along with “driven,” “pragmatic,” and “confident.” (Does this sound like you?)

But competitiveness is more than just the drive to win, not taking no for an answer, following up multiple times with leads and being assertive in asking for the sale.

Part of igniting the competitive fire happens within. Improving your performance with each passing day. Bouncing back from losses and mentally preparing yourself for the next chance to create value and win.

In short: Competing against your past self.

If that sounds like cheesy sports wisdom, you’re right. My first boss played college football. He would always tell our business development team (after losing out on a pitch to a competitor) the following mantra:

“Turn your mistakes into lessons, lessons into habits, and habits into wins.”

Salespeople and marketers can benefit from this process of competition with their past selves. Particularly if you’re using modern technology to aid your messaging process. The data and insights gathered along the way can inform your strategy and tactics in a powerful way.

One of the key principles FranFunnel prides ourselves on is giving you an exceptionally high amount of data for you to feed back through your sales and marketing decisions. As a user, you can download all your lead data and get the answers to all the questions that you would ever want to have.

Of course, massive spreadsheets give some people hives, myself included. And it can feel onerous to dig through all that data to find the critical numbers you need to improve your performance. 

That’s why we provide you with snapshots that are making the data as useful for you as possible to do rapid analysis. 

Eli did a helpful tutorial on FranFunnel’s charts feature if you want to see exactly how it works:

As you can see, this data gives you answers to the immediate question, i..e, how are things going right now? 

But more importantly, the month on month and year on year analyses gives you data to answer an even bigger question, i.e., how well are you competing against your past self?

Ideally, you’d want each month to be better than the last and the same for a year on year look. And if that’s not the case, you can isolate where you may be able to improve your performance. Don’t worry, we can help. Our users email us about this all the time, and we’ve got some helpful answers for you.

For example, if you notice your contact has plummeted from 74% to 56% in the past year, it’s not too late to remedy that decline. This FranFunnel chart data should compel you to reconsider the main factors that are going to affect contact rate, like required fields, form validation, source distribution, message copy, email and phone strategy, and so on. (Read our guide to Contact Rate here for more insights on this.)

On the other hand, your dashboard charts may indicate a dramatic uptick in engagement rate, from 49% to 67%. Well done! This should give you confidence that you’re already adhering to text message best practices, like giving easily answerable questions, keeping texts short, not wasting valuable real estate on empty characters and using automation to enhance the personal touch. Keep up the good work.

Ultimately, our job as a tech provider and a data company is to give you access to the most useful information as quickly and easily as possible. That way, you can make better sales and marketing decisions tomorrow.

Next time you login to your FranFunnel dashboard, take a minute to check out your charts. See how well you’re competing against your former self. 

Use the past as a motivating force in the present to improve your performance for the future.

Scott Ginsberg is Head of Content at FranFunnel. He is the number one least competitive person he knows in the world.