Know What’s Working: Introducing High Impact by Costello

The quarter just ended. Your team hit quota, but it was a nail-biter until the end.

It’s become clear that to hit your goals for the rest of the year, your sales team needs to increase its close rates.

The good news is that your sales ops team has jumped through some CRM data hoops to calculate your close rates (or they just used our conversion rate calculator).

Now for the bad news: The report only tells you WHAT the close rate is. It doesn’t tell you WHY the close rate is what it is.

And if you don’t know the underlying factors driving your close rate, then it’s very hard to figure out HOW to improve performance.

Does your team need to do a better job during Discovery? Are they having a hard time getting to power? Without any insights into the operational details of a deal, it’s hard to know where to invest to improve performance.

So, what do you do? If you’re like most sales teams we work with, you’ll start by analyzing a bunch of closed deals to identify these key factors. But you’ll quickly realize that most of your data is made up of chicken scratch notes and blank fields where the data was supposed to go.

As a result, you’re forced to rely on anecdotal team feedback otherwise known as your “gut”. The problem is that you’ve already been doing this, so you’re back at square one.

What if you did have the data? What if you could see — quite literally — which factors have an outsized impact on your close rates?

What if you didn’t have to ask “what if” anymore?

Introducing our High Impact score. It uses machine-learning to identify the data points in deals that have a big impact on winning and losing deals.

But where most algorithms are a black box, we give you a beautiful way to see, quite literally, which data points matter most in deals.

With High Impact, you’re able to:

• Figure out which specific data points — like customer goals or pain points — are most impactful on close rates and make sure reps collect them during the sales process
• Determine which data points are “deal breakers” that indicate a deal should be removed from your pipeline so you can be on top of your pipeline management
• Know when you’re heading down the winning path on an opportunity

I know what you’re thinking. We still have a “what if” dangling out there — the one about having this data in the first place.

Well, I have even more good news for you.

We know that reps are managing more deals than ever, and it’s hard to keep track of these important data points.

Costello gives your reps reminders everywhere they work:

• When they’re updating their pipeline – check.
• When they’re doing a deep dive in Deal View – check.
• On the call while taking notes – check.
• Right after the call when pushing key data back to the CRM – check.

So, stop asking “What If” and start getting the insights that will help you increase your close rates and improve your pipeline management.