It’s that time of the year when resolutions are in abundance.

2017 was splendid. Our business grew by over 3X, we added 30,000 more users, and our core application got a lot smarter to really augment conventional sales intelligence; as one user put it – like a second brain. See Snapshot of Vymo 2017.

This year, we want to continue our focus on end-user adoption and meaningful use. Everything else is incidental. So, we’re adding features around Pervasive Intelligence, Simplified Integration and Self-Serve that will enable our users to do more, easily.

So, here are our top four resolutions for 2018:

Resolution #1 – Ensure at least 80% of Vymo’s user base is hitting ‘minimum engagement hygiene’ with their prospect & customer base

One of the things we measure very seriously at Vymo is our user engagement. If salespeople do not use our application, everything else is redundant. It won’t matter how amazing our features are, we won’t be able to generate any insights for sales leaders nor impact our customer’s business, tangibly. Incidentally, this is the elephant in the room with respect to CRM software – less than 30% of salespeople use CRM applications. [While Vymo’s average engagement using the same metric is over 80% of clients.]

There are varying degrees of engagement that we measure:

1. The first is fairly straightforward – is the sales rep checking the Vymo app on a daily basis? It indicates whether Vymo is relevant in the salesperson’s day.
2. The next is measure is if the salesperson is adding tasks and updating activities on Vymo. This indicates the salesperson is actually using Vymo to enable his work.
3. The final measure is if the salesperson is engaging their prospects and customers frequently enough. A target number of 80% for this measure implies meaningful use of Vymo and accrues most benefits & impact to our customers’ top line.

Trivia: Vymo was able to increase the number of meetings per day per sales rep for India’s largest private bank from less than 1 to 2.2 in under two quarters.

Resolution #2 – Enable skill assessment of every Vymo user across a core competency list

Often, organizations disproportionately support and incentivize upper quartile salespeople (top 1-50% of the sales force) to do more. This is prioritized over raising the productivity of the bottom quartiles, with relatively more scope for improvement. Last year, we graphed a model for some of our clients based over a 5 year period and the results were starkly apparent: while it may be impossible to up-skill every salesperson in an organization, identifying those with the potential to do better and investing in their improvement yields rich dividends.

Vymo logs interactions (calls, meetings) and captures metadata (How was your meeting with Mr. Smith?) with minimal intervention from the salespeople. These numbers feed into real-time metrics, such as Deal Velocity, Responsiveness, and Conversions for the salesperson. Further, this data is used to evaluate core competency metrics, such as the effectiveness of communication, product knowledge, and perseverance. Sales leaders can use this data to reskill their teams appropriately. While these metrics were organization specific, Vymo can now suggest benchmarks based on industry.

Resolution #3 – Ensure managers have at least one skill-building intervention with their sales reps every month

The fundamental difference between a top quartile salesperson and a bottom quartile salesperson is what happens in between calendar events. This requires initiative and perspective, which are higher order sales skills, from the average salesperson. Often, Sales Managers fill in this gap through periodic qualitative interventions on calls and meetings. Although important, these are superficial adjustments and have a limited pay off in terms of improving overall outcomes for the salesperson.

Vymo is able to build in managerial interventions through next best actions, which nudges ‘best behaviors’ among salespeople.

This in-app coaching also reduces the number of mundane interventions required from sales managers and enables focus on two quality areas:

• High-level improvements based on skill rank
• High-value in-the-moment interventions

This year, we are ramping up our Data Science and AI focus to help Sales Managers coach their teams effectively and improve overall outcomes in a more tangible way. As Yamini (Co-founder & CEO, Vymo) said earlier this month in a Hindu Business Line interview:

“... AI will empower and augment salespeople with additional intelligence, rather than make them redundant. AI will let salespeople focus on more human attributes of their work, such as empathy, higher order intelligence and other aspects that may require human discretion and engagement. If anything, it will help salespeople be more human.”

Resolution #4 – Reduce the time spent by sales reps doing mundane, unproductive tasks

Sales reps spend 21% of their day writing emails, 17% entering data, another 17% prospecting and researching leads, and 12% scheduling calls. This means they spend only 1/3rd of their day actually talking to the prospects! (Hubspot blog)

Higher sales productivity is the major pillars on which Vymo is built. If a sales rep is spending so much time doing ancillary tasks which are not contributing to the productivity as a whole – there is a problem. With the release of ‘Suggestions’ we have already been helping you automate a few of the below tasks by suggesting:

• Scheduling of calls
• Arranging meetings
• Reminders to complete a particular action
• Alerts to clear critical backlogs

We want to take the intelligence driving this to the next level. Every sales team follows Pareto’s principle: 20% people contributing 80% of the revenue. This means that the top quartile is doing something different that is working very well. Vymo aims at learning this behavior and motivating the sales reps falling in the rest of the quartiles to help close deals better. For example, if a top quartile sales rep sends a follow-up email on the 3rd day of the first meeting and it has been very fruitful for him, Vymo will track this trend and bring it out as a suggestion for the rest of the team.

Moreover, Vymo will eliminate the need to go back and check through your pipeline to see what is pending, what follow-ups need to be done, which leads needs to be met on priority and so on. Vymo will be able to automate all of these tasks and pre-set a sales rep’s calendar as per a number of parameters developed as per the data available.

This will make sure that wherever a lead or a partner is in the funnel, it will not be missed out and room for error is diminished. Most importantly, the sales rep will be able to prioritize more efficiently with the help of data backed suggestions.

Is there something that you would like us to focus on? We would love to hear from you on what we could do to significantly improve the productivity of sales teams and organizations. Happy 2018!

We love you.