Much like marketing, sales skills are useful to everyone.  This is also an area that is pervasive throughout life.  It has far more than just business applications.  There are two sides to sales.  The soft side is where you see people able to sell ice cubes to Eskimos.  On the other hand, you have the statistical part of relationship management, pipelines, and even contracts.  We will focus on that second side for now because that is where technology can provide the most value.
Customer Relation Management (CRM) is becoming so important that the related applications are almost a commodity.  You can find core CRM features in a calendar, desktop database, and even e-mail applications.  These scratch the surface of what can be done to help in CRM.  If you want to see how far these little applications can grow, then take a look at enterprise solutions like SalesForce.

Crafting Solutions

The area of sales is one where the terminology and meaning behind concepts are vital to building useful solutions.  The terms vary a little by company and platform.  However, the core concepts of a customer, a prospect, a lead, a sale, and when a transaction is considered complete are all needed when creating a solution.  These concepts are essential for you to understand clearly.  Therefore, the questions you ask related to these areas will provide insight and build confidence in your knowledge.
You may not see this as an area well-suited to statistics.  However, there is a wealth of information available when you mine sales data.  This is the stuff that multi-year sales projections and closing likelihood are built on.  It is important to remember that sales are the lifeblood of a company.  That translates to being able to move IT out of being a cost center and into a strategic initiative when you build sales tools.

 

Popular Data

One of the best parts about learning how your sales team identifies and tracks people is that the same process shows up in other areas of focus.  This includes social networking sites.  Even though there is a lot of buzz about Facebook and how they share or sell data, they (and nearly every other social site) use member data for sales purposes.  Even when they do not release the raw data to other companies, they still analyze that data for purposes to sell to you.  Google has mastered this sort of data analysis with the Ads platform.  As a friend has stated, when you are not paying for the product you are the product.

All of this combines to make sales skills and the related data a trendy topic in the current business world.  The more you know how to wheel and deal with this data, the better.  You can launch a successful consulting business solely based on your ability to help your customers know more about their customers.  Of course, there is still a lingo challenge in this arena besides just understanding how to work with the data.  I think you will find that is the smaller hurdle to overcome.  Honestly, if you like the number-crunching and data analysis part of programming, then CRM data is a playground of ways to analyze a situation.

A Lot of Data

Another area of focus that can be used by sales skills is big data.  It is important to remember that sales are not just about the person that makes the purchase, it is also about the product.  This is where people have their head explode.  Think about all of the shopping cart checkouts and the permutations of products and the attributes related to each one of those products.

That alone gives you an almost unimaginable number of ways to slice and dice trends and common denominators from checkout to checkout.  When you combine that with personal traits you can find facts like women between sixty and seventy years old buy products that are blue far more often than ones that are red, but only if the product is larger than one square foot in size.  I made that up, but that is the kind of detail one could potentially derive from sales data.

That is where you can not only provide value for your boss; you can also create all new products.  The business intelligence field is just getting started with ways to analyze data and find new ways to improve sales.  The work you do could lead you to a revelation that launches a product and even a company.

Rob Broadhead

Rob is a founder of, and frequent contributor to, Develpreneur. This includes the Building Better Developers podcast. He is also a lifetime learner as a developer, designer, and manager of software solutions. Rob is the founder of RB Consulting and has managed to author a book about his family experiences and a few about becoming a better developer. In his free time, he stays busy raising five children (although they have grown into adults). When he has a chance to breathe, he is on the ice playing hockey to relax or working on his ballroom dance skills.

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