In Sales Ops, we love benchmarks. What’s the average win rate in our industry? What should ramp time look like? How does our pipeline coverage compare? There’s comfort in knowing where you stand relative to the field.
But there’s a problem with averages. As basketball coach John Wooden noted, “Being average means you are as close to the bottom as you are to the top.”
By definition, when you compare your team to the average benchmark, you are evaluating how you stack up against mediocre companies and even the really bad ones. You’re calibrating to the middle of the pack. Measuring yourself against the teams that are struggling, treading water, or just getting by.
Is that really who you want to compare yourself to?
What’s better than benchmarking?
Instead of asking, “How do we compare to the average?”, have you considered asking, “What’s already working and how do we get more of it?”
This is reverse-engineering. You start from your best outcome and work backward to figure out how you got there.
It doesn’t take much thought to see that this approach is like to give you better results. And it doesn’t take any fancy software or complicated formulas to do it. Consider these ideas:
- Take your top 10% of closed-won deals from the last year. What did they have in common? Certain industries? Deal structures? Rep behaviors? You’re not looking for what your average deal looks like—you’re looking for the ingredients of your best deals.
- Look at your fastest-ramping reps. Not the average ramp time—the outliers. What was different about their first 90 days? Did they have a particular manager? A specific territory type? A different onboarding experience?
- Examine your highest-retention, highest-expansion accounts. What patterns show up in how they were sold, onboarded, or managed? That’s your blueprint for account strategy—not an industry benchmark about average retention rates.
Change your mindset, change your strategy
This simple shift changes the conversation that sales ops has with leadership. With benchmarks, you’re always telling them, “We’re above average” or “We’re below average.” That information might be an interesting data point, but it doesn’t really tell you what to do next.
Reverse-engineering, by contrast, lets you tell the executive team, “Here’s what’s working. Here’s what causes that. And here’s how we can achieve that more often.” It’s a strategy, not just a report card.
If you’ve never gone through this sort of reverse-engineering process, why not give a try? Start with just one of the areas mentioned above—deals, reps, or accounts—and run through the exercise. The answers are already in the data. You just need to find them.
If you’re not sure how to go about the process of figuring out what caused your good results, we have some resources that can help with that too. Check out Optimizing Sales Operations, Using Sales Analysis to Drive More Growth, Building a Data-Driven Sales Operation, and Diagnosing Sales Problems
We’ll close with one more quote about being average. John D. Rockefeller once said, “Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.” Reverse-engineering makes it easy to do just that.
Optimizing Sales Operations
Over the last few years, most teams have changed their day-to-day operations quite a bit to deal with all of the challenges. So how do we make sense of this patchwork to make our operations more efficient and effective?
How to Use Sales Analysis to Drive More Growth
Sales analysis often has much more potential than it is given credit for. This on-demand webinar explains how to using the analytical processes and underlying data to reveal powerful insights and opportunities for growth.
Building a Data-Driven Sales Operation
Building a data-driven sales operation where anecdotes and opinions have ruled for years is no easy task. In this on-demand webinar, learn about transforming your sales processes and team culture to make much better use of data.
Diagnosing Sales Problems
Failing to identify the true root causes of sales performance problems often leads to a frustrating game of Whack-A-Mole. In this on-demand training webinar, learn how to identify and correct the real root causes behind sales performance issues.
