There are many things you can do to improve the efficiency of your sales team. One of the best ways to do that is by using sales analytics which refers to using data and analytics to improve sales performance.
In this article, let’s dig deeper into sales analytics and how you can do it for your business.
What is Sales Analytics?
As said above, sales analytics involves using data about your sales team’s activities and sales pipelines to make business decisions. It helps you understand where your business is strong and where it needs improvement so that you can make informed decisions about your company’s future. Sales analytics is commonly used in forecasting, pricing, and planning.
When doing sales analytics, you’ll need to track sales metrics and perform data analysis of previous and current sales performances to identify trends and patterns.
How to Do Sales Analytics
Follow these steps to start:
Step 1: Determine Specific Objectives
Before you start analyzing your data, you need to decide what you want to explore and what you want to achieve.
Do you want to see how much each customer spends in the store? How many of them return? Do you want to know which products are popular with customers and which aren’t? Or do you just want a general sense of how well your business is doing overall?
Whatever it is, think about it carefully before diving into the data analysis process.
Step 2: Decide Analysis Frequency
Decide how often you want to run sales analytics. Consider capturing data regularly so that you have an accurate picture of what’s happening in your business.
If you want to see how your sales are doing over time, it’s best to look at monthly figures. However, a quarterly analysis can be more helpful if you want to identify specific trends in your data.
Step 3: Start Collecting Data
You’ll need to collect data from your sales team and external sources, like customer feedback surveys, social media posts, and email inboxes. You can use tools like SurveyMonkey and Revenue Grid’s Auto Capture to do that.
Step 4: Analyze Data
After collecting it, you need to look at what’s happening with your customers’ behavior, trends, and patterns to make informed decisions about your next actions. This means looking at the numbers and thinking about how those figures relate to each other and what they mean for your business.
Step 5: Create an Action Plan
Once you’ve identified which variables matter most, create an action plan based on those findings. This could mean anything from sending reminders via text message to having employees meet once every quarter at the company so they can discuss how they’re doing on their current projects.
Sales Analytics Best Practices
- Choose the right data analysis method: Some methods are better suited to specific purposes than others. For example, descriptive statistics can give you a broad overview of your data, but it doesn’t tell you much about why things are happening or how they relate. This can help you figure out what’s going on in your data, but it won’t tell you what to do next
- Visualize your data: By using charts or graphs, you’ll be able to see trends and patterns in your data that may not be immediately apparent. The best way to visualize your sales analytics data is by using a tool that allows you to create dashboards that give you a quick overview of your company’s performance.
- Centralize data in one place: Seeing all data in one place enables you to access what you need when you need it. It’ll save time and energy and ensure everyone who needs access to the information can get it.
- Don’t rely on only one type of data: Use several types of information together to make your predictions more accurate.
- Ensure insights are actionable: Your insights should be useful and practical—not just for you, but for the people who will use them. It also means they’re timely and relevant.
- Keep statistical significance in mind: Statistical significance is the most important thing to remember when using data analytics because it determines whether or not your results are valid and reliable. If they’re not significant, they’re just random noise that can’t be relied upon for any real insight into the company’s performance.
- Use an AI-powered data analytics tool: Excel spreadsheets are great for getting started with data analysis, but they can be hard to update and modify to fit your needs. Consider using an AI-powered data analytics platform to make your job easier.
Ready to create your first sales analytics report?
