Although poring over sales data may not be at the top of your priority list, the information you gain from it can help you grow and enhance your firm.
Business owners may be preoccupied with cash flow, but monitoring sales data is just as critical. You won’t be able to notice a trend, eliminate a product, or increase inventory to match demand if you don’t look at your sales. With sales coming from an increasing variety of outlets, accurate and effective sales analytics is becoming increasingly important.
As sales analytics consultants the Pearl Lemon Consulting team is helping businesses of all sizes make the most of what sales analytics has to offer, not only to improve and streamline their sales processes but to improve their business overall.
The technologies and techniques used to collect sales data and assess sales effectiveness are referred to collectively as sales analytics. These important indicators are used by sales leaders to create targets, improve internal procedures, and more precisely anticipate future sales and revenue.
The purpose of refining sales analytics via sales analytics consulting is to make the information available to you as simple and easy to understand as possible. They should assist you in clearly understanding the success of your sales team, as well as sales trends and prospects, and not lead to so much confusion that the valuable data and insight they offer go unused because no one knows how.
In general, there are four types of sales analytics:
Descriptive Sales Analytics: Descriptive analytics comprises tools to keep track of historical sales data—revenue, number of customers, and so on—in order to make comparisons and gain a better understanding of what’s going on right now. They are the number you need to stay on top of every day to ensure you have a clear picture of your firm’s current sales health.
Diagnostic Sales Analytics: What happened, and why did it happen? Diagnostic analytics is the process of reviewing and diving down into sales data to figure out why something happened. Whether it is a sudden sales slump, product sales plateau, or even an unexpected – but obviously welcome – sales spike, diagnostic sales analytics will help you understand what went on.
Predictive Sales Analytics: Predictive analytics is the process of leveraging what you’ve learned about previous sales to identify patterns and trends. This enables you to make accurate predictions about both what the monetary value of your future sales might be and which products/services are likely to be the best sellers.
Prescriptive Sales Analytics: What is the most effective solution or course of action? Prescriptive analytics entails analyzing all available data and using it all to advise on the best course of action.
Sales analytics, when properly utilized, can offer companies all kinds of useful insights, solve a lot of problems and ultimately improve every part of the sales process.
The sales funnel refers to the buyer’s activities from the first point of contact with your business to the point of purchase. These can be short and sweet – a customer following a link from a content piece directly to a web form for example – or, as is often the case in B2 sales, a multi touchpoint journey that goes through several stages.
A close review of each stage of a customer’s journey – and even those customer interactions that do not result in sales – can help optimize each part of the process by indicating where you might need to make big changes, minor improvements, and other tweaks. These could be anything from changing the lead magnets needed to draw in customers to improving website architecture or tweaking sales scripts.
Sales analytics can also help you determine how best to automate some processes, such as lead prospecting, and by doing so give sales representatives the opportunity to focus only on closing sales.
Sales analytics like team performance metrics can help determine what practices work best in making sales. Marketing teams and sales representatives can review each stage of the process and its success individually. For example, marketers can collect analytics about content that consumers interact with versus content that gets little interaction and use this to create more engaging content.
Using sales analytics helps to optimize the sales funnel and make improvements to the sales process leads to greater sales efficiency. But proper use of sales analytics data can do much more. As sales are the lifeblood of almost any business you can use the data collected via sales analytics to inform, and improve, all kinds of business processes, from optimum staffing levels to ideal inventory levels, and to optimize and improve your marketing efforts.
For businesses looking to secure funding accurate and extensive sales analytics reports are a must. Being able to quickly and accurately offer potential lenders and investors a comprehensive report of your business’ sales health via sales analytics can both speed up funding processes and boost the amounts you can receive.
The same is true of reporting to shareholders and other interested parties.
As your sales analytics consultants, Pearl lemon Consulting will review and analyze the existing sales analytics systems you have in place, work out what is working and what could be improved, and, in many cases, recommend updated or new software and systems for collecting sales analytics in the first place.
Today software moves fast, and while you may have been using the same simple sales analytics software for years – or perhaps something as rudimentary as an accounting program – there is a good chance that making use of the far more detailed CRMs and sales analytics software currently available will be far more beneficial to your business.
One of the mistakes many companies make is assuming that just ‘watching the numbers’ is enough. Sales analytics is not just about numbers, they should touch every part of the sales process and go even further back, right to the beginning of the sales journey.
As sales analytics consultants the Pearl Lemon Consulting team will also ensure that you get the best ROI possible from your sales analytics software and processes. This often includes ensuring that those who will be tasked with using the data understand both the operation of the software itself and everything it has to offer.
But these are not our most important tasks. As sales analytics consultants we will introduce you to all the ways you can make better use of the sales data you collect to improve your business in general. We can also show you how lesser-used techniques like A/B testing can improve many aspects of your business and how sales analytics can be used to report the results of such tests. We can even train you to use new software if needed.
A Sales Analytics Consultant can offer services such as sales performance analysis, data-driven sales optimisation, customer segmentation, and predictive sales analytics.
By utilising Sales Analytics Consulting, companies can gain insights into their sales performance, pinpoint areas that require improvement and make informed decisions based on data to enhance their sales techniques and boost revenue.
Sales analytics consulting benefits any company looking to boost sales, boost income, and make wiser business decisions. This covers organisations of all sizes and sectors, such as e-commerce, B2B, and B2C.
Ready to learn more about how sales analytics consulting can benefit your business?
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