"Flying a 747 at Night:" Sales Ops VP Evan Randall on Sales Analytics

Tableau's superhero VP of Sales Operations Evan Randall is responsible for enabling a sales force that handles thousands of leads, works globally-- and by the way, has been doubling on a regular basis. Without good analytics, he likens the job to "flying a 747 at night." Last week he described how he uses sales analytics to bring visibility-- and sanity-- into his job.
Ellie Fields

Tableau's superhero VP of Sales Operations Evan Randall is responsible for enabling a sales force that handles thousands of leads, works globally-- and by the way, has been doubling on a regular basis. Without good analytics, he likens the job to "flying a 747 at night." Last week he described how he uses sales analytics to bring visibility-- and sanity-- into his job.

Evan's got some perspective on this. He's done it at AMD, Spansion, Dell, and JDSU before Tableau. He was recently named one of the thirteen "Top Sales Operations Leaders of 2013" by Sales Benchmark Index.

The old way

Evan was dealing with scattered data: quotas in spreadsheets, 2 CRM systems, and a bunch of databases. It took weeks to see any kind of metrics. They were flying blind. The company president wanted a command & control dashboard to see the state of sales.

Evan looked into creating such a dashboard and found it would be $850,000 and 9+ months-- he knew that wouldn't work. Then he found Tableau and got it done in 3 months.

The new way: sales analytics that drive sales

"When you can wake up in the morning as a leader and see what's out of whack, that's what drives performance," says Evan. So that's where he focuses his time. "Make sure you design a process that is efficient and effective: it gets the right things done, in the right ways."

How do you do that? Most importantly, know your data. Take an inventory:

  • Where is it & in what format?
  • Is it duplicated?
  • How is it collected?
  • Which sources are the most reliable?
  • Be rigorously selective.

Arm salespeople with the right information

Evan says, "How red in the face is a salesperson when they call a contact and they don't know about a support request?" He describes one example in the Tableau's Who's Hot dashboard, a place for salespeople to go to see all the activity within an account.

Salespeople can see what what accounts are seeing increased activity in whitepapers, training, and even support requests. It's a very powerful analysis and it directly drives performance.

To see more, watch the whole webinar on-demand.