B2B sales people are incredibly results oriented yet, according to CSO Insights, sales performance continues to degrade. In such chaotic conditions, Slywotzki's ideas on Profit Patterns and Tufte's ideas on Visualizing Information, hold promise as a potential way out of this muck. We'd strive to measure process productivity, then depict it visually, as patterns, in ways that change how people behave. We'd produce higher performance via 'Patterns of Performance'.
The measurement part's easy to champion, but tough to do.

Barriers exist:

• Capturing the Data is Disruptive
  Today, capturing sales process performance data requires disrupting the process ("excuse me, can you please stop selling for the next hour and fill our your CRM sales report so that I can get a sense of what you've been up to"). Disruption degrades compliance. People hired to do one thing (sell) resent having to spend their time doing something else, especially something that they're not very good at (reporting and forecasting).
• What's Captured is Incomplete
  In sales, process performance isn't just affected by what a sales person does, it's also contingent on what, if anything, a buyer goes on to do on their own time as a result of conversing with a sales person (producing 10 proposals, for instance, this week is an important part of enabling hi performing sales processes, but it's not enough; if no buyers read those proposals, we're still a long way from a hi performing process).

For now, let's just imagine there were ways of overcoming these measurement barriers. We'd still be left with how to paint a visual picture of what's going on that anyone could understand at a glance. Here's where patterns can have a huge impact.

Slywotzki contends that people learn from experience by discerning patterns. Patterns are especially crucial when things, at the surface, seem chaotic and it's become impossible to see what's going on by looking at things in conventional ways. In my view, this aptly describes the state of many B2B sales processes today. Adept leaders have become pattern-discerning, and exceptionally profit generating.

The first time I realized the power of seeing patterns of system performance in this fashion was in 1983, when I heard Ed Tufte describe his just released seminal work on visualizing data. He contended, back then, that most information was presented in ways that appealed to people's stupidity. He advocated an approach to graphing data which revealed patterns and provoked deep thinking.

Sprinkle Slywotzki's and Tufte's ideas onto today's challenges in sales productivity. The takeaway: help sales people see and understand the patterns of their impacts on buyer behaviors and they'll astonish you with the brilliance of their responses. They'll not only learn, they'll go on to have more impact, more often, often more profoundly and predictably than anyone could see coming.

Originally posted on Informed Innovation in B2B Sales Productivity