A Gartner survey of 303 sales leaders designed to understand the current state of sales analytics and the metrics used to drive insight generation and behaviour change within sales functions has found current solutions wanting. The survey revealed that 84% of sales leaders agreed that sales analytics has had less influence on sales performance than expected.

The top barriers to analytics success were identified as data privacy concerns or regulations (45% of respondents), poor data quality (44%), and limited cross-functional collaboration (44%). The survey also revealed that Chief Sales Officers (CSOs) leading analytics are 2.3 times more likely to achieve higher forecast accuracy than non-CSO led analytics. Furthermore, CSO-led analytics are 1.8 times more likely to exceed customer acquisition goals than non-CSO led analytics.

"With analytics comes the expectation of transformative decision making, but the reality is that many organisations struggle to produce actionable insights regarding their most important decisions," said Kelly Fischbein, Senior Principal, Research in the Gartner Sales Practice. "The net result is compounding complexity: More uncertainty creates more demand for analytics, which creates demand for more data, which in turn presents analytics teams with challenging operational barriers."

Gartner suggests CSOs to deploy a decision-driven analytics approach, build specialisation in their analytics organisation, and analyse seller performance metrics comparatively to drive actionability. "To achieve higher strategic influence of analytics, CSOs must lead when it comes to aligning analytics strategies to sales objectives and communicating insights from analytics," added Fischbein.