Implementing revenue analytics is great for tracking your revenue performance and identifying problems that affect your revenue growth.
This article will walk you through an overview of revenue analytics and what you should do to execute it for your business.
What Is Revenue Analytics?
Revenue Analytics is the method of collecting and analyzing data to analyze revenue generation activities, evaluate revenue performance, and develop strategies to boost revenue further.
Why You Should Use Revenue Analytics
When looking at revenue analytics, you can understand:
- Is your sales revenue increasing over a specific timeframe? How was it compared with previous periods?
- What are trends for key metrics like customer acquisition costs, annual recurring revenue, win rate, average deal size, etc.?
- How many deals did your team close?
- How many opportunities were converted into closed deals?
- How many leads were converted into opportunities?
- Where and where did you achieve peak performance?
- Who are the top-performing sales reps in your team?
- What activities did your team do that helped drive the most revenue?
By seeing how revenue has changed over time, you can update sales management processes to improve revenue performance and make more accurate sales forecasting.
Where and How to Start Doing Revenue Analytics?
There are two common ways to start doing revenue analytics.
The first method is Microsoft Excel. Excel allows you to create heat maps to identify what data you should focus more on, make pivot tables to quantify text-based data, or use formulas to calculate metrics. It also supports charts to visualize data, making it easy for you to determine the trends.
While Excel is beneficial in many ways, it has certain drawbacks. For example, it doesn’t keep your reports updated; you have to manually input data and create charts; there is a high chance of data errors due to faulty copy-paste, wrong calculations, etc. The more data you collect, the more errors your spreadsheets might have.
That’s where the second method comes into play: using revenue analytic software.
A revenue analytic tool like Revenue Grid serves as a central hub for your sales and revenue data and reports. It integrates with common systems like Salesforce, mail, calendar, and cloud storage and automatically syncs data across these platforms. It also keeps track of all the changes in your sales pipeline and displays them on an intuitive dashboard. Your sales team can access it anytime and anywhere and never miss out on any important information (more on this later).
Revenue Analytics Process: What Steps Are Included
Here are three steps to get started with revenue analytics:
Step 1: Standardize data. Determine the timeframe you want to analyze revenue performance and collect all the relevant and meaningful data. This step is crucial if you have data from multiple sources like marketing, supply chain, accounting, email, social media, etc.
Step 2: Select a revenue analytics tool and start analyzing. As said above, you can use Microsoft Excel or adopt revenue analytics software to interpret data. The goal is to find out how your sales revenue is performing over the chosen period and what insights you need to act on.
Step 3: Share results with relevant stakeholders. Include graphs and visuals to help others understand your findings. Try to keep your presentation actionable and easily digestible.
Revenue Analytics Software
There are a lot of tools out there that support revenue analytics capabilities, for example, ProfitWell and InsightSquared. But if you need a comprehensive solution that not only turns data into actionable insights but also guides your sales team towards actions that bring the best results, you may want to consider Revenue Grid.
As introduced above, Revenue Grid is a revenue intelligence platform powered by artificial intelligence. It offers a wide range of features that help accelerate revenue for sales teams. When you integrate Revenue Grid into your tech stack, you’ll get access to Team Analytics, engagement statistics of email sequences, Revenue Signals, Sales Forecasting, and more.
With full access to data and insights, you can be sure you’re always on top of whatever happens in your revenue generation process.