LucidEra co-founder and VP of Market Development Ken Rudin is so confident that his company can find you $100,000 of risk or opportunity in your pipeline within 48 hours that he is guaranteeing it - or he will pay you $1,000 cash. In times like these, wouldn't it be nice to know which accounts could add this kind of money to your top line? Or conversely, eat up a lot of your sales force's time and never close? Sales 2.0 companies - those that are applying science, measurement, and predictability to selling in addition to the art of building strong customer relationships - are getting smart about how to identify the best sources of revenue in their pipeline, forecast, or prospect database. They also know how to make investments that are most likely to produce sales results and decrease sales costs without hurting their quarterly numbers. How do they do it?

With a measurable sales process and data analysis.

Everyone these days is talking about sexy customer engagement tools and social media, but an equally important element of practicing Sales 2.0 is establishing a "culture of measurement" that keeps us accountable and enables strategic decision-making.

Consider the following examples:

• If your data show that your deals are getting stuck at the "contracts and paperwork" stage, might that not indicate an opportunity to pilot technology to accelerate the last part of the sales cycle? An online contracts tool like EchoSign or web collaboration software like Citrix Online's GoToMeeting could accelerate these buying decisions.
• If a few of your reps have a much shorter sales cycle than the rest of your team, couldn't it help to figure out what they are doing differently, share their best practices, and implement appropriate sales training to improve performance in the rest of your organization?
• If the majority of your customers comes from investments in particular marketing programs, don't you want to focus whatever budget you have on those programs?
• If you know your inside sales team has a higher win rate and a shorter sales cycle in accounts where the average deal size is less than $100,000, wouldn't it make sense to assign these deals to your phone and Web channel to increase revenue while decreasing sales costs?

Unfortunately data and reports from most CRM systems cannot alone help you recognize these opportunities and make these critical choices. Products from companies like LucidEra, which just announced its Spring '09 release, make it easy to analyze the data coming out of your systems so you can make the best decisions that have an impact on sales. I checked out Darren Cunningham's easy-to-follow online demo and discovered that the new release emphasizes dashboards, which make it super easy for even the busiest of managers to get visual snapshots of sales performance, pipeline stage analysis, and rep performance - data critical to sales success. As an aside, I learned from CEO of SalesBrain Patrick Renvoise last week that all decisions are ultimately made by the part of the brain that responds to visual stimuli, so dashboards are not just a "nice-to-have" representation of information - they are core to our thinking!

A sales manager and business owner myself, I am keenly interested in being able to accurately interpret my sales team's pipeline and forecast (i.e. what can I "take to the bank"?) And like our clients at Phone Works, I want to dig in to reports and gain insights to guide my decision-making. Specifically, right now I am focused on determining:

1. how to best allocate my sales resources
2. which customers in which industries are most likely to buy
3. which customers in which industries are least likely to buy

How are you making these choices and what is influencing your decisions?