Q4 Wrapped - Trends & Topics
We did a Spotify style wrap up on thousands of questions asked by Sales people in Q4 to see what's trending.
At Workbounce we help Sales teams find answers to questions that are standing between them and moving a deal forward. Sales questions are often just a thin proxy for customer questions.
We wanted to understand what sales people, and by extension customers, are asking about in Q4. We aggregated and anonymized tens of thousands of questions and ran them through our topic extraction model
If topic insights for your team sound interesting, we’ll be launching Topics as a way for our customers to explore their own data in January. Understand what your reps and customers are most frequently blocked by, so you can fix it.
Topics and Trends
Getting Deals Closed
Sub-topics and keywords include commercials, signature, legals, pricing.
Questions about closing trend up steadily over the quarter. The highest peak is the week of December 4th, with a little lull and then a big push week of the 18th Dec. It’s interesting to note how deal closing tends to accumulate towards end of quarter. Anecdotally this is also my experience in sales teams, where we’d see a big push in the last month. It would be interesting to see how this plays out for the rest of the month.
Building Pipeline
Sub-topics and keywords include blogs, one pagers, customer stories, demos, videos, podcasts.
A large portion of this trend is accounted for by requests for marketing and sales assets for top of funnel. It trends slightly down throughout the quarter with two big humps centered around the 16th of October and the 13th of November, roughly mid-month.
Product Questions
Sub-topics and keywords include features, bugs, integrations, apis.
I’m including this trend not because the chart tells a particularly interesting story, but because it was by far the most dominant topic, with almost 30% of all questions being product and feature related in some way.
Q1 Planning
Sub-topics and keywords include Q1, targets, quotas, kick-off.
The first few weeks of the quarter show no questions related to Q1 planning from sales reps. As the quarter progress it begins trickling in slowly at then, spikes, then dies down. I imagine everyone has their Q1 planning mostly wrapped up by this point.
Topics for your team
If you’re interested in seeing trends in your own data here’s a sneak preview of what that might look like. Our goal is to help you see the macro-trends, but also dive into the nitty gritty. There’s a big difference between questions like “where’s the pricing calculator?”, “how do I create a pricing proposal?”, and “how to I overcome pricing objections?”. Each of those require different solutions, so understanding your gaps comes first.
Here’s what it might look like for your team. If you’d like to see a demo or get started talk to us here.
