Growth in sales and sales analytics go hand in hand. That’s for sure.
Why?
That’s because sales analytics is the practice of combining sales data with data analysis to understand your sales funnel in greater depth.
The knowledge enables you to, say, forecast sales, or create sales communication, or essentially, make any sales decision based on data or evidence.
In other words, instead of taking a shot in the dark, you make informed and realistic decisions and sales predictions.
These decisions are more accurate, more likely to succeed. That’s how you drive sales.
With that in mind, here are the 3 golden rules to make the most of sales analytics.
Rule 1: Set clear goals
Sales analytics solutions offer incredible advantages, but only if you know what you are doing.
Consider data, for example. The data you can collect and analyze to predict sales is virtually unlimited — historical sales data, customer feedback, customer service data, social media. On it goes.
Most of the data might be irrelevant to you.
And therefore, to make the most of your time, before you begin, ask yourself, what am I looking for?
What follows is an active approach to sales analytics —
- Identifying a clear and distinct goal — The Why
- Knowing what data to collect — The What
- Identifying steps to make the sales funnel easier to slide through — The How
Knowing what you are looking for — and why — gives the process structure. And that structure can be made more rigid if the goals are clear, distinct, and quantified.
When the goals are quantified, translated into KPIs, the steps to achieve them can also be quantified — definite and actionable.
That’s how you make the most of sales analytics: By combining relevant sales data with data analysis to produce insights that are actionable, such that you can make changes to your strategy that are informed, calculated, and definite.
Every step is well-planned. Nothing is left to chance or ambiguity.
Rule 2: Communication is key
After you have determined your why and what, what follows is the how.
It might seem that the former two are more critical, that the how is much easier and more automatic.
Of course, it isn’t.
Your sales team may identify targets that are clear, distinct, and quantified.
Then, it may collect, sort, and analyze relevant data to learn actionable insights.
But are those insights really actionable if its members don’t understand what they mean? How can your team, then, act upon them?
Clear communication is how.
By translating critical insights to your team in a way that makes them easily understood and accessible, you ensure that they are on the same page when you move on to the next step. That is, re-adjusting strategy to achieve your goals.
Modern solutions like business intelligence tools can help you achieve this.
By adopting them, not only can you automate the collection and analysis of data, but you can also visualize the insights to make them more easily understood.
Data visualization empowers communication, which empowers change.
Rule 3: Change is the only thing constant
The best strategies are dynamic strategies — strategies that constantly evolve to neutralize future risks.
There is no end to creating such a strategy. It is an ongoing process. You identify targets; you achieve them. Then you move on to identify new ones.
That’s how you never miss out on new and upcoming opportunities.
Since sales analytics is a huge part of your strategy, it also must be an ongoing process.
Re-visiting your decisions and predictions make them more accurate: As you constantly evolve, identifying new targets and data sets, re-visiting sales analytics allows you to course-correct.
Neutralizing future risks by being constantly on the move also leads to making fewer mistakes. In other words, you save future costs.
So, in the end, you cannot make the most of sales analytics. You have to keep making it.
