From ABC To ABA

Over the years, Always Be Closing has transformed into Always Be Analyzing.

“Put that coffee down… coffee is for closers only!” That was one of Alec Baldwin’s famous lines in the 1992 movie Glengarry Glen Ross. In this classic scene, Alec’s character unleashes on his sales team and fires a sales agent for drinking coffee.

He carries on with a profanity-laced rant about “ABC: Always Be Closing” and how getting the customer to sign on the dotted line is the only thing that matters to a sales person.

A lot has changed in the sales world over the past 30 years. Technology has evolved, buyers are more informed and data is everywhere. In today’s world, the most effective sales cultures are able to leverage data from multiple sources to better understand their customer’s current and future needs.

This insight inspired Charles Ross, Senior Editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to come up with the acronym “ABA – Always Be Analyzing”. The catchy phrase hits home for me. Most sales environments still spend a significant amount of time manually collecting and aggregating data and far too little time spent analyzing it.

In an attempt to better understand today’s sales trends and what separates sales leaders from laggards, Qlik engaged the trusted 3rd party research experts at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). The EIU surveyed over 550 senior sales executives from around the world including 149 chief sales officers and c-level execs. The questions were focused on getting to the heart of how they manage the sales process, what are the barriers, how data and analytics are used and how do they build a culture of data analytics.

The results of that survey are summarized in today’s press release and will be shared in a September 15th on-demand webinar featuring Charles Ross from EIU, Chris Morton from the Mentor Group, and yours truly from Qlik. The EIU also published a summary report: Unique Selling Points: Separating Sales Leaders From The Pack which is posted on their website.

We look at Separating Sales Leaders from the Pack with research from @TheEIU

There are far too many good nuggets of survey findings to share in this brief blog post but I’d like to call your attention to one additional way you can interact with the results. While we’re all accustomed to consuming reports in static PDF and PowerPoint slides, we decided to throw the survey data into Qlik Sense so it could be more freely analyzed and consumed in a visual, online, mobile-friendly environment. In less than a day, the team built two versions of a Qlik Sense app – one which used the native (out of the box) features of Qlik Sense and one which leveraged the Qlik Analytics Platform to build a mashup app with a custom UI leveraging the Qlik Sense APIs and engine.

What did you discover or find interesting from the research? We’d love to hear a few insights in the comments section below.

 

In this article:

Keep up with the latest insights to drive the most value from your data.

Get ready to transform your entire business with data.

Follow Qlik