Sales is equal parts art and science and one of the keys to success is leveraging sales incentive data to increase performance and ROI.  Jason Atkins is the founder of 360 Insights, a software platform that enables large brands to execute all of their channel incentive strategies. Jason’s company works with tens of thousands of salespeople who work for major brands and helps them get smarter and make data-driven decisions.  Critical data Many people believe that sellers must be born with the skillset to succeed. We believe that anyone with a desire to sell can succeed and get the proper training. Understanding data will help tremendously.  The art of sales deals with the relationships, the conversation handling, and dealing with objections. The science of sales revolves around data and activities.  Jason recalled hearing that we’ve created more data in the last year than in all of mankind combined. That kind of growth is exponential. Think about how much data that represents.  So how do you mine through the data and leverage the insights contained within it? How do you make the data actionable? Leveraging data Many companies believe that consumers buy products become of promotions or rebates. Jason’s company doesn’t believe that’s always accurate. Their response to these situations is that they’ll track the data and the consumer purchase information, and they’ll figure out why the consumers bought what they did.  What they found was that the promotion was the fourth reason the consumer purchased. The number one reason was “because the sales guy told me to buy it.”  The question becomes why are you so focused on the promotion when you should be focused on the key drivers to the relationship? Consider how you’re educating the buyer about your product? How are they ensured that you’re the trusted advisor? Purchases are a big decision, and people often buy based upon advice from others. How are you leveraging that to ensure that you provide great advice? Status quo Many of us make choices based upon the status quo. Zig Ziglar tells a story that his wife always cut the ends off of the meatloaf without really knowing why. Turns out the meatloaf was always too big for the pan she had, but no one knew that’s why she did it. Zig’s wife just always cut the ends off.  In sales, we often do things because that’s how our company has always done it. Instead, we should look at the data and determine what is actually most effective.  Jason’s company always deals in context for the data. In the case of the meatloaf, no one had context for why the ends were cut off.  Determine the context for decisions that were made in the past, then look at the hypothesis of what we should be doing in the future. Then we can execute against that and then measure it.  Executing sales incentives One of the first keys is to understand why people sell what they sell. Jason’s company started by interviewing 1,500 sales reps to determine why they sell what they sell. They determined that sellers do so because of quality, because of price point, because of brand, because they’ve been educated, to ensure happy customers, because they want to know what’s in it for them, and because they of the relationship they have with the brand.  People don’t want to sell something that isn’t great. They like to buy something they’ve heard of before, so new brands often struggle.  Creating sales incentive Focus on building data around the data you have, and building context so you can get to better decisions.  Start by understanding the customer journey and the decisions that are made throughout that journey. Then align the incentives across the journey. At the end of the day, an incentive is just a motivation tactic to get to a specific action.  Incentives might include rebates that are perceived as price discounts, sales incentives that motivate a seller to keep a specific brand top of mind, or volume incentives to drive sales into locations.  If you want