Become a data wizard within less than 1 hour!
Sales analytics tools are helpful to map out the entire sales funnel, from prospection to sealing a deal. They assist in shaping, understanding and predicting the sales trends and results, but also gather data on the main actors of this department: the salespeople. Sales stats will give you two types of information: one part related to the customers and the sales activities in their globality, and the second related to the vendors, agents, cold-callers, anyone working to sell your company’s product or services. Sales analytics software are a critical part of any business: monitoring data by setting up specific metrics to track and building recurrent sales reports can help you optimise your teams’ activities and increase your performance.
But sales data, as we saw, is plentiful and varied. The numerous aspects sales teams have to focus on and the pressure they are under to attain result sparks the need to get an appropriate dashboard providing all the info that can be understood in a glance. The challenge hence lies in the capability of managers to accurately define the right objectives, and to their teams to achieve them. To do so, the managers also need to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their employees, where and what they could improve – sales analytics tools are here to help.
In our fast-paced, hyper competitive economies, you need to put all the odds on your side to thrive and sales data is the key to make your company stand out amongst the competition. With data presented on a modern sales dashboard, you can track your customer trends, purchasing habits and behaviour on your ecommerce platform, you can see which products are selling better than others, and which stores are performing better. Thanks to all these findings, you can ask the right questions to understand what lies behind these differences and learn from it, in order to implement the strategies that work the best in the right place, at the right time.
At datapine, we believe that aggregating your various data collected on different data sources is a great advantage. Having the possibility to work on your sales analytics in a central location will bring a greater transparency and efficiency in your data analysis – and this is easily possible with implementing business intelligence in sales. With such assets in your hands, you can improve your customer relationship by knowing them better, through their demographics, their preferences and how they act on your page – and that way, target their needs better, increasing your chances to renew a sales deal. It is important to maintain a good relationship as you are more likely to sell to an already existing customer than to a new prospect, and that also costs less money and efforts. Having a better customer service also gives a good image of your brand, and people who dealt with you are more likely to recommend you to others, increasing your commercial reach. Finally, on a more company-cantered view, business intelligence in sales can be enlightening on your employees: who sells more, who sells less, how, who needs training, and where are the bottlenecks. You can understand your staff differently than with only subjective impressions, and make better-informed decisions that will benefit everyone.
Once you have decided to strengthen your operations and bolster your decision-making with sales analytics tools, there are a couple of best practices you can adopt. As a start, to make the most out of your analytics, you need to focus on the right sales metrics. To do so, asking the right business questions is key to find the right answers that will make your sales activities thrive and outperform past experiences. Brainstorm and choose the sales KPIs that will answer your questions, set measurable and achievable goals, and track them on a regular basis.
Identify sales patterns in your datasets to forecast or at least, draw a couple of predictions concerning the future sales trends, so as to always be one step forward concerning any change in demand. This is also very helpful when it comes to staffing and coaching your sales reps. You can use business intelligence in sales to analyse both individual performance and historical data on the ratios of efforts invested in the sales outcomes, leading to a better managed team, and an enhanced sales strategy.
Become a data wizard in less than 1 hour!