Introduction
A leading company always has clients at its core. In the past, advertising and competition were all about pricing. With the development in the sales world, if you are planning to get and keep customers, you will have to interact and build one-to-one level relationships with them.
However, only interacting with your customers and building relationships won’t be enough. As a prosperous modern organization, you require certain techniques that can allow you to understand the needs of your customers in this rapidly evolving world. One such technique is data-driven insights that can enable you to update your products and services by keeping the latest needs of your customers into consideration.
The practice of generating insights from your trends, metrics, and sales data to set targets and forecast sales performance is known as sales analytics. A fine practice, when it comes to sales analytics, is to closely tie all activities for setting objectives for your sales team in addition to determining revenue outcomes.
Your sales analysis should mainly focus on the overall improvement of the organization along with developing various strategies for enhancing the performance of your sales team in the long term. You can set role-specific targets or objectives for your team in the form of metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) which is quite a common example of sales analytics.
Importance of Sales Analysis
Many new and existing successful businesses including renowned companies like Airbnb and Uber use data analysis as a key element when it comes to updating their services and products according to customer needs. In such a case, you probably don’t want to risk being left behind or defeated by, possibly, a new startup introduced by entrepreneurs that are quite data-focused or by a more data-savvy competitor.
If your business was media production, your sales would certainly be the lead actor. A weak or strong performance can immensely affect your entire team and organization. When you are monitoring the sales data analytics of your organization in the form of sales metrics, there is a good chance of your performance getting enhanced, accountability getting improved, and your sales activities getting optimized.
Sales teams generally have a variety of activities that the sales reps need to focus on besides operating in a rapid-paced environment. Having a well-defined sales data analytics strategy can prove effective in providing your team much better focus and clarity so they can continue concentrating on hitting the targets and doing what they do best.
Along with studying the importance of sales analysis, it is recommended to gain some ideas regarding the use cases of sales analytics. Following are 5 sales analytics use cases that you should be aware of:
- Constructing a foundational customer data model
- Optimizing the alignment of resources
- Investing in the future in the long term
- Maintaining a focus on the right opportunities
- Accelerating time to market
Types of Sales Analysis
You can refer to different kinds of sales analysis reports based on your sales goals for getting insights. The following are five types of sales analysis that can be utilized for any sort of business.
1. Sales performance analysis
A sales performance analysis can come quite in handy when you want to measure the effectiveness of your sales strategies and how well your sales team is performing. The sale performance analysis involves conducting an overall strict financial analysis that is based on the generated sales revenue. This sort of analysis, generally, lets you differentiate between how you are currently performing versus your expected performance.
2. Market research
The second form of sales analysis is quite critical. In this type of sales analysis, the members of your sales team utilize the surveys of customers and lead them to gain insights. The members of your sales team can either conduct such surveys either in person or via phone or email. Market research is effective when it comes to gaining an idea of the current condition of the market among your customers.
3. Diagnostic analysis
The diagnostic analysis involves justifying the observations and trends in data related to sales with reasonings. For instance, with an increase in competition in the industry, your product sales might be decreased. Being a sales team leader, you can conduct an internal diagnosis that can help you in identifying the roadblocks for your team, list your observations, and find out ways to improve the situation.
4. Product sales analysis
You might need to conduct regular product sales analysis if your company offers many products. This will allow you to find out the items or services that are overcrowding your product or services lining. KPIs and revenue bar charts make it convenient to look at your overall product sales or in a particular period. Product sales analysis will allow you to approach your product sales data from certain angles like product popularity and demographics.
5. Prescriptive analysis
In this type of sales analysis, businesses use predictive information to learn further about their customers. Prescriptive analysis can determine which deals you should leave behind and which ones are worth chasing. With the assistance of such analysis, your sales teams will have a decent approach ready for the deals the sales team decides to pursue that can certainly make the customer or lead receptive to the sale.
Performing Data Analysis in Sales
Data analytics can prove useful when you want to understand the behaviour of your customers and predict how their behaviour can change in the future. It can also help you in recognizing why your customers leave, making compulsory improvements to your services and products, targeting retention campaigns at such customers most that are at risk of leaving.
More companies are striving to be data-centric these days than ever before to help them compete effectively in the marketplace. However, only a few of these companies get lucky enough to have worked out how they can utilize their data to get their business to generate more profit. Insights are surely powerful but only when they support change. Therefore, you must use the gathered information to inspire meaningful and valuable actions in your business. Along with actionable insights, you can perform an analysis of sales forecasting that can assist you in making better future decisions.
According to a tech marketing expert, Lisa Arthur, the customer-centric journey mainly consists of the following four stages:
- Integrate
- Analyze
- Act
- Execute
For making sure you cover all the above four stages, let us guide you step-by-step to perform sales data analysis effectively.
1. Identify the problem
Like most of the researches, you have to start with a certain question. It is not enough just to know what data you will be gathering, you also need to have some idea of what you will be doing with the insights and data once you acquire them. What problem are you looking to solve? How will the data you will gather help in solving the problem? This approach will help you in ensuring that the resulting gathered data is both applicable and relevant.
2. Use the right metrics
When it comes to applying insights to your business accurately and practically using advanced data analytics, you need to get the metrics right. According to Gallup, a lot of companies mainly focus on descriptive analytics and neglecting predictive analytics and diagnostic analytics. However, you can improve your business in the future only by utilizing all the three different types of data gained through these three types of analytics.
3. Put the right system and infrastructure in place
The data you gather will play a vital role in influencing your top-line future decisions regarding your business. Therefore, you need to make your data reliable. According to Gallup, many companies lack internal experts that assess whether the data is accurate and can come in handy to solve their problems. When you put the right infrastructure and the right system in place right from the beginning, you can yield data that can prove accurate, useful, and quite easy to understand.
4. Use the right experts
You will also be needing certain well-organized teams along with skilled data experts that can produce data out of raw spreadsheets. After that, they should map it to the market in a useful way with the help of certain strategies. It is quite significant for businesses to have intelligent departments in data analytics that have the correct capabilities. No matter what level your business is at, you always need expert and skilled employees that can use the gathered data appropriately to make it useful for the organization.
5. Execute and deliver
Collecting along with analyzing your data is not going to be enough to produce expected results. For example, when you identify your most famous products, it might assist you with your supply volume; However, it will not directly help you in selling more units. What you need to use is the insights and information to execute and then deliver change right within your organization. In simple words, utilize the insights and data to improve and enhance your internal processes. If you disregard or neglect your carefully acquired valuable data, you will not only be wasting your time and money but you will also be risking damaging the overall reputation of your company.
Types of Sales Analysis Reports
There are different types of sales reports with each one having reporting rules that are different from others. The following are the main types of sales analysis reports with a brief explanation.
- Promotional sales report – Used to measure promotional efforts and sales performance. This report tells you about all the sales where a certain customer was given some sort of promotional discount by your sales rep.
- Coupon sales report – Used to track the sales that involve the use of coupons.
- Common sales report – Used to give info regarding the sales that do not include a discount, promotion, or an allowance.
- Won or closed opportunities report – Such reports tell you the number of sales that your sales team is concluding monthly along with the names of the representatives who are successfully closing these deals. These reports can also inform you regarding the sales trend over time.
- Daily call report – This report consists of the number of times a sales representative calls customers. It includes the data of who the sales rep talked to and what they talked about.
- Productivity report – This report consists of the record of all activities that happen within the organization and it also tells whether each sales rep is performing accordingly to meet the expectations or not.
Big Data & Analytics
Since the internet went mainstream around 20 years ago, big data has become the greatest game-changing opportunity for sales and marketing. Big data provides insights into how investments in CRM can be improved, which content is effective at each of the stages of the sales cycle, along with the strategies for enhancing conversion rates and customer lifetime value.
When it comes to software companies, big data is providing insights into how to enhance CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), how to lower the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), and how to properly manage various other customer-driven metrics that play an essential role in running a cloud-based organization or business. Big data is generally the future of marketing and sales which we will be separately discussing in the next section.
The Future of Marketing & Sales
A multimedia eBook Big Data, Analytics, and the Future of Marketing and Sales, recently published by Forbes has all the answers to the questions popping in the mind of modern entrepreneurs.
Almost all organizations today are facing overwhelming amounts of data, rapidly changing customer behaviour, increased pressure from competitors, and organizational complexity. The organizations that are already utilizing Big Data and analytics are generating around 5 to 6 percent higher profit than those of their competitors.
As for the data itself, it is nothing more than mere 0s and 1s. However, it all depends on the organizations how they are utilizing it to generate profits for them. Today, the prosperous companies do the following three things quite well:
- Perform various analyses and then use results to identify the latest opportunities;
- Begin with the consumer decision journey;
- Keep the processes quick and straightforward.
Sales and Marketing Analytics Tools
Marketing analytics tools are key elements to assist marketers to keep track of their marketing performance. The goal here is to enhance the effectiveness of marketing strategies and activities and get profits from investments. In simple words, marketing analytics tools can assist your marketing team in both improving their effort and proving their worth.
A satisfactory tool can save you around half of the time you spend on analysis and administration duties. Such a tool is Grabb Ai which provides you with an analytical view of your business with the help of comparison charts and much more that can help you in keeping track of your progress and making better future decisions.
Conclusion
Generating insights and performing various analyses periodically is a good practice that is carried out by leading businesses around the world. Various types of sales analysis can generate useful data that can ultimately prove helpful for your organization in the long term. For instance, you can utilize this data to predict future possibilities which can help you in making the correct decisions on time.
However, to perform data analysis in sales, it is necessary to go through a proper method involving a series of steps that do not allow any, even a minor, element to be left behind. Once the organization goes through the process, the valuable data acquired should be handled carefully by skilled employees or experts that are capable of generating a profit for the organization.
In the whole concept of data analytics in sales, the sales and marketing analytics tools are of much importance. Such a tool can assist organizations in performing analyses without the chances of any possible anomalies besides, saving the valuable time and resources of the organization. Grabb Ai is an AI-powered recommendation system that can be of great use for your organization when it comes to performing various types of analysis mentioned in this article.
Besides, Grabb lets you keep accurate track of your company’s sales performance and predicts the customer lifetime value and customer behaviour. The customer buying behaviour in the Grabb system allows you to decide accordingly for the future events regarding the strategies you are planning and determines whether they will prove effective or not.
If you are curious and want to learn more about one of the best AI-powered solutions for your organization, in the long run, let us know. We will provide you with all sorts of information that you require for all of your queries in the best and most accurate way possible.
