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Shark or Mark: Applying Pro Gambling Strategies To Sales Management
Shark or Mark: Applying Pro Gambling Strategies To Sales Management
Historically, gamblers rely solely on gut instinct and feelings when placing their bets.
Though the risk of losing money is significant, there is often little to no strategy behind players’ decision making.
The same is true in sales management.
Many sales managers use only their gut to answer these questions around their team’s performance:
Where are we going to land this quarter?
What is driving bad outcomes?
What about good outcomes?
What can you do about said outcomes?
This failure to use data leads sales managers to misjudge their reps and mismanage their teams.
Similarly, a failure to use data in gambling leads casino-goers to lose hundreds of millions of dollars per year on bad bets.
Luckily, there has been a push in recent decades to use data science to understand the best strategies for various types of gambling, including blackjack, poker, sports betting, and more.
Sales managers should be leading their teams with a focus on leveraging data to identify problems, derive insights, coach their reps based on those insights, and continuously loop the process back to square one.
Pete Kazanjy (Co-Founder & CRO @ Atrium, Founder @ Modern Sales Pros) and Sean Cardenas (Sales Manager @ Atrium) led this masterclass, Shark or Mark: Applying Pro Gambling Strategies To Sales Management.
Discussion topics
The 21st century approach to betting
How this applies to your sales *management* motion
Leveraging data to understand where you're trending toward your team's goals
How to identify the underlying causes of success and of failure
And, how to course correct to hit (or absolutely smash) your number
Key Takeaways
It’s time to bring sales into the 21st century by leveraging the data that’s available to sales managers. Data empowers sales managers to make better judgments about rep performance. Modern sales managers look at input, output, and efficiency/quality metrics to assist with decision-making.
Rep performance issues can be hard to address. Understanding the data behind those issues, what levers you can use to improve said data, and how to coach on those levers is key. Automating alerting on rep performance issues is ideal so you can spend your time coaching vs looking at data.
Using methodologies like the OODA Loop, sales managers weave data into their operating rhythm. OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act.