Some people treat LessWrong as just a philosophical exercise, but "Rationality" and its little brother "Critical Thinking" really can make you a rockstar in the corporate world if you so choose. I'm going to give a bit of background on some things that I've managed to accomplish in the last couple years by thinking when no one else would, then I'd hope to get some feedback and suggestions for future optimizations. Feel free to skip to the "-----------" below if you want to skip my brag section, though I am writing it to help give an idea of the landscape.

At the SaaS startup I work at, I've worked in a few different departments. I started in Support and decided we needed training videos and better articles to reduce the load on Support reps, so I made them and set up a process for forwarding people to the appropriate video/article instead of answering questions directly. This saved Support Rep's time.

When I moved into Account Management and Implementation, every new client account needed a minimum of 5 hours of AM training time. I decided this was inefficient and recorded some more training videos, then set up an LMS so our clients could do self-paced training and designed an implementation process around it. I measured engagement after certain time periods and there was no difference between the live trainings, so we kept it. This has saved thousands of hours of AM time over two years. I noticed that another call we did with every client was the same questions and the same responses, so I wrote a supplementary Rails app "wizard" so that clients could go through that themselves, saving another hour off of every implementation.

I've recently moved into the Sales department and I'm looking for ways to optimize this department as well, both with logistics and tools and proven sales strategies. The first thing I did was set up a way for SalesForce to generate our contracts automatically instead of Sales people having to fill them out each time which will save our Sales team 15-30 minutes a day each. Low-hanging fruit.

Does anyone have any suggestions for things that I could look into to optimize our Sales department?

Every current "best practice" seems to be based on anecdotal evidence and I've already seen my company royally screw up A/B testing by peeking and retiring options early, so I don't trust that anything is based on an empirical foundation.

Some of the issues I've noticed are:

1. Meetings are set in advance by a qualification team. Sometimes we have no-shows. I'm looking to reduce that. What resources are available about encouraging people to keep commitments? If i'm going to test things, like a call or email the day before, 2-3 days before, etc. as a reminder and collect data, how much data would I need for meaningful results? How should I randomize? Would I need to adjust for other factors? (ex: small prospects miss more meetings in general)
2. "Demos" currently have a very basic structure: Get background and identify problems => Do a Demonstration => Quote pricing => Follow Up. Already, adding the question "What's it going to take to make this happen?" has been hugely effective in identifying the real obstacles and what to do next. I have considerable Sales experience, but in a non-tech industry, so I don't know what will transfer. If I decide to test whether doing a Need Satisfaction Selling Cycle or a simple Feature-Description-Benefit sales approach is better, how would I collect data?
3. Are there any non dark-arts Sales techniques for Enterprise (B2B) Sales that are backed up by science? (I've read Influence, but I'm dealing with whole organizations here)

Any other ideas to try or test would be great. Thanks!