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Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series:  Capturing Activities Means Capturing Lost Revenue

By Steve Valenta, SVP Strategic Partnerships, Cien.ai

Why Does Activity Capture Matter?

The ability to capture how sales professionals allocate their time across sales activities is an incredibly useful and powerful tool. Every individual is different and they each have their own methods for success. For example, some might spend more time building a pipeline, while others spend more time with their existing clients looking for opportunities to grow their wallet share and others work hard cultivating and nurturing new leads.

Most Activities are Not Recorded

A lot is required of today’s sales professionals: networking, prospecting, closing deals, understanding existing client needs, upselling, following up, learning & development, keeping up with industry trends and trying to capture daily activity. Even with all the amazing CRM technology, the human factor remains an area of weakness when it comes to capturing data timely and accurately. I am sure we have all experienced a team member who was less than perfect at entering leads, opportunities, meetings, phone calls, etc. (maybe that person, is you?) And no matter how many times leadership begs, threatens or bribes their team to enter their activities, it will never be perfect. Remember bad data leads to bad decisions.

“Remember that bad data leads to bad decisions.”



What Happens When You Understand Individual Rep Behavior?

A lot of good things. The first step is to understand what’s missing from your database. At Cien.ai we have developed a measure called “Activity Capture Level” which allows us to measure what percentage of activities are missing for an individual in a given month. With that you can then infer much more about how they and their peers are spending their time. Specifically, time spent performing sales activities, how many of those activities are logged versus not logged, the duration of each activity and the time a professional spends on a specific sales process step. With this type of analysis our partners can quickly make adjustments based on current industry and market conditions.

  • Identify GTM team behavioral trends
  • Provide managers with specific areas of feedback for each professional
  • Determine average time spent on a deal
  • Help leadership answer the “Why did rep X over/under-perform?” question

About the Cien.ai Growth Essentials Series

This article is part of our Growth Essentials Series, inspired by our work with B2B business leaders, growth consultants, and PE operating partners. These articles focus on the non-technical aspects of improving GTM performance. If you want to dig in on the technical details of how to measure the concepts we use here, please refer to our “Practical RevOps Analytics Series”.