In a November 2022 report, Gartner’s Chief of Research Craig Riley raised a pressing issue – sales talent attrition is on the rise, and retaining them will be harder than ever in 2023. His comments were based on an August 2022 survey conducted amongst 900+ B2B buyers, which concluded that a staggering 89% felt ‘burned out from work’. It’s not just the USA. The Great Resignation debate is live and raging across the world.
Forbes echoed the same sentiment as Gartner, recognizing the growing talent crisis in sales and cautioning managers of the various harms that come along with high attrition rates, one of them being damaged customer relationships. Every sales manager reading this bit will resonate with the word ‘catastrophic.’ Forbes research also indicated that more than half of employees feel overworked by their employers.
OF SELLER DRAGS AND ‘COGS IN THE MACHINE’
One of the key causes that leads sales talent to this level of exhaustion is termed ‘seller drag’, a phenomenon that causes employees to procrastinate on work and deliver lower output. One of the roots of this ‘seller drag’ lies in employees having to undertake non-value-adding administrative tasks, and a consistent emotion of being just a ‘cog in the machine.’
To tackle this problem, many organizations opt for tools and/or platforms that help departments achieve their objectives. We find advocacy for this approach from Stephen Diorio (Executive Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute and an author, among other things) who discussed the need to reconfigure the daily workflows of sales professionals by simplifying their technology stack.
However, there’s just a slight problem with this strategy:
No one is particularly interested in using these technology stacks.
SIMPLICITY – THE ROOT OF TECHNOLOGY STACK ADOPTION
Greg Munster, Global Sales Operations Director of Canonical, quips
“After years of supporting sellers with sales enablement systems at IBM, Red Hat and Lenovo, I’ve learned the key differentiator – and driver of value – always comes down to simplicity, intuitiveness, and user adoption in the eyes of the sales user of process or tool.”
Technology stacks carefully curated by Insights Teams, for example, for their sales managers, are perceived as ‘complex’ and capable of only compounding the daily data-related struggles of these sales champions. As such, they steer clear of such tools right from the get-go – our own research at vPhrase Analytics found that out, when we interviewed senior Brand Managers from globally-renowned firms such as HUL, Marico, Godrej, and others. While tools were available in abundance, their usage was next to none.
RETAINING SALES TALENT – WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT
If you’ve kept up till now, you would’ve noticed we
- Recognized a very pressing issue in the form of higher sales attrition in 2023
- Pinpointed the tiring daily workflows of sales professionals as a core contributing cause to the attrition, and
- Spoke about the well-intended approach of concerned departments like Insights Teams in building technology stacks, but the approach being ill-received due to the stacks being too complex to adopt and use
It’s a focused discussion we’re having. Let’s continue:
A SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE TOOL FOR YOUR TECHNOLOGY STACK
We dove into the heart of the matter and found the ideal solution: consolidating data from multiple Excel files. Sales Managers have multiple datasets at their disposal and have to constantly shift between and examine multiple Excel files to extract a data pivot or test out a hypothesis. They face multiple challenges en route; access to some files is missing or delayed, standardizing and updating these files is a consistent, time-consuming process.
Sales Managers revert to Insights Teams to help them with ad-hoc analysis. Help does arrive, but often late, rendering the insights to a great extent, valueless. Can’t blame the Insights Team, either. They’ve got tasks other than conducting ad-hoc analysis for Sales.
We’ve developed Explorazor, a simple data exploration tool that integrates multiple datasets into 1 standardized dataset and provides unified data access to users. Users query the consolidated dataset via a simple search interface and extract instant data pivots. Explorazor is powered with double-click, or point-and-click drill-down for instant root cause analysis. The idea is to ensure on-time and independent data analysis for managers, and these features prove pivotal in helping them identify market opportunities and internal and external issues. Explorazor contributes to revenue growth and employee satisfaction simultaneously.
There are many features we haven’t talked about here, like the ability to download desired data pivots as CSV files and take them to Excel, or the super-clean user interface that makes managers want to work on Explorazor. You can also read the blog we’ve written on how Explorazor differs from Power BI.
CONCLUSION
Retain sales talent by easing their day-to-day challenges. Explorazor can help simplify the daily data exploration activities of Sales Managers, and it’s a very simple tool to understand and adopt, and effective to boot. While it’s not the only tool you may ever need, it certainly is the perfect complement to Excel, and therefore a must-have tool in your tech stack.
Why not take a quick look at Explorazor? Here’s an introductory video to get you started, and you can schedule a call with our solutions consultant for the full demo.
Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor!
