What is Sales Data Analysis?
Before we discuss the advantages, let us begin by clarifying what we mean by sales analysis.
Analyzing sales figures is an indispensable approach for businesses to take full advantage of their sales potential and satisfy customer requirements in a fiercely competitive environment.
It is no longer necessary to have a sales data analysis strategy fail due to a dearth of data, however if this is the case, here’s how to fix it.
More businesses are being able to make more exact, analysis-supported decisions related to sales control, resulting in a diminished margin for error. Depending on assumptions and estimates can render your business vulnerable to disruption by companies and startups that are more familiar with standards and stats, no matter what field or sector you’re in.
Fortunately, an effective sales analytics platform can lead to large boosts in earnings and profit margins by giving your business the ability to make more informed choices.
Importance and Benefits of Sales Data Analysis
1 Improve Value Propositions and Price Points
By understanding how to interpret sales figures, you can make sure that you’re always conveying the proper message to the right consumer, when it matters the most.
It can be difficult for companies to come up with value propositions that are persuasive enough to interest each group they target in their promotional strategies. Most firms go for a generic tactic, but businesses that depend on data are able to try numerous value propositions with diverse customer segments to determine which are the most advantageous.
It is feasible to construct intensely customized value offers that are tailored to the particular needs of each customer group by obtaining and examining data from sales analysis.
Figuring out the optimal cost for new items and services to guarantee the most noteworthy sales and income is a further obstacle. Utilizing market analysis and automated pricing techniques, businesses can experiment with various prices to uncover the ultimate cost for each product as well as for each set of clients.
Companies have realized that in order to bring in the highest profits, they should increase their prices. Price hikes may lead to a drop in the number of sales, but by making the average sale worth more money, it is likely that your total revenue will increase.
2 Narrow and Refine Product Offerings
Examining sales figures can furnish a business with lots of valuable information that will enable them to economize and upgrade their product lines.
Examining purchases can help to identify products which have lower sales rates than usual, or those that have poorer selling numbers in distinct parts of the customer base. You can then look into why their results are not as good as expected and use customer comments to adjust products so that they fulfill what people want.
You could also decide that certain items are no longer worth producing or backing. You can reduce expenses by eliminating products that are not doing well, and devote more energy and resources to the goods that generate the most income and success.
3 Disruption and Innovation
In order to stay ahead of the competition, you need to be able to swiftly adjust to different marketing circumstances, trends, and customer requirements. In this ever-changing, rapidly evolving business landscape, constructing a sound data analytics strategy could be the key to allowing your company to stand out among the competition.
Examining the sales figures lets you swiftly discover what clients need and offer tailored solutions quicker, more effectively, and with less money than your competitors.
The future success of any business will depend upon how well they can utilize their data to spot shifts in their market swiftly, and how fast they can create solutions to fit their clients’ requirements.
4 Accurate Sales Forecasting
Examining past sales figures allows one to make estimations concerning potential sales in the future. Using historical data allows you to have a precise and realistic estimation of the amount of money your team could bring in during a set period. This is instead of having to make goals which may be too ambitious.
By accurately predicting how much income will be generated, leaders can use that information to assign resources and manage the personnel in a more effective manner. Eliminating superfluous consumption gives them the ability to act more agilely and rapidly react to transforming market trends.
Analyzing past sales information enables you to evaluate how your organization is doing relative to industry standards to see if you’re headed in the right direction. If you find that the amount of sales you are generating does not match what is normal in the industry, you should start looking into the underlying cause and make the modifications that are needed.
5 Performance Assessments and Incentive Plans
Sales managers can make an accurate prediction for every sales representative’s activity when given dependable data, and analyze the current performance against past results.
If a sales rep has shown below-average performance, sales managers can spend additional time providing guidance and instruction to them.
Conversely, if a sales representative displays remarkable success, sales directors can recognise and encourage their effort, and make use of the rep’s expertise to coach the other members of the group on how to conduct their own strategies and strategies.
Examining information from your customer relationship management system can provide insight into how your reps spend their time, making it possible to find out what activities are most effective at concluding sales and creating profit.
By making use of sales data analysis, administrators are able to be more effective in rectifying performance problems, determining achievable sales objectives, rewarding top achievers, and inspiring their staff.
6 Increase Retention Rates
Studies conducted by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company have revealed that elevating customer loyalty by just 5% can give a noticeable rise in profits between 25% and 95%.
You should make sure that the members of the sales team are aware of the major purchasers and concentrate on providing the best service so that customers remain satisfied and loyal.
It is likely that you can recognize which customers are your main accounts, however, by looking at purchase data, you can discover which others are increasing rapidly.
It is essential to be able to figure out which accounts are the most substantial and give them the highest focus for your squad as you cannot manage to lose those essential customers.
It has been found by Esteban Kolsky that a shockingly high number of customers, which is 67%, report that negative experiences is an underlying factor for them to churn, yet only 1 person out of 26 discontent consumers put up a complaint.
Sales data analysis provides you with the information necessary to discover the chief reasons why customers are leaving, so you can detect those in jeopardy and take action immediately to ease any complaints they may have and ensure they are satisfied.
Discovering individuals who have registered for a free trial of your product, but have not yet started utilizing it. When you are able to spot these accounts in the test period, you can contact them to give support or training to aid in getting them going and aid them in understanding the utmost benefit of utilizing your product.
1) Identify Which Topics to Blog About
Examine your blog analytics to find out which matters your intended crowd responds to. Sort blog posts into specific categories (HubSpot customers can do this by exporting the Blog Analytics and organizing them in Excel) and assess the number of views for each individual post. Are you seeing any patterns in the way certain topics have been doing compared to others?
Tailor your plan so that you generate more information concerning topics that appeal to your target buyer personas, and fewer articles regarding topics that are not of interest. As an illustration, if you specialize in incubating and rearing unicorns, and you maintain a blog that addresses a variety of concerns related to unicorn care, it’s likely that your audience is significantly more intrigued by posts concerning unicorn nutrition than posts that touch upon unicorn physical activity. If that is true, you should make more material regarding nutritious unicorn nutrition!
2) Refine Your SEO Strategy
If you are not a newbie, it is expected that you have already done some preliminary keyword research for your SEO approach. If you wish to progress and refine your tactic, the SEO analytics you’ve compiled thus far can be very helpful in choosing which keywords to include in your backlinking and content production endeavors.
Examine your feedback analysis to decide which keywords have caused the most people to go to your website, create leads, and buy your products. This will help you recognize what search words people are entering to find you, and which ones result in traffic that is pertinent (i.e. the ones which increase prospects and customers). You may want to take this data into consideration when selecting other extended phrases that are related to the successful keywords.
You can also use this information to recognize areas that need improvement in your content production plan. If your website or blog post is creating a lot of attention for a given keyword or saying, but none of it is resulting in conversions, it could be because you have no promotional items that are related to that particular keyword for people to convert to. Utilizing that data, you could craft new propositions to solve that issue and start taking advantage of all the missed web traffic.
3) Decide Which Social Media Sites to Spend Your Time On
It is challenging to decide how much time should be dedicated to each of the multiple social media sites available. Let analytics be your guide. Check each individual traffic source to figure out how much traffic and how many leads each social media platform is referring to your website. Many marketers feel that LinkedIn is their best resource for garnering leads via social networks, but this could vary for you.
You should also utilize closed-loop data to calculate how many of the visitors and potential leads are transforming into customers for each social media platform. Then allocate your time accordingly. If Twitter isn’t producing much activity such as visitors, inquiries, and purchases, but you’re getting a great return from Facebook, then focus more of your energy on interacting with your Facebook followers and less on Twitter.
4) Determine Email Frequency
Do you send emails to your contact list too frequently, or not frequently enough? In order to find out the best email sending frequency, you must perform some tests. The knowledge you ascertain from your analytics will help you to identify the perfect frequency. First, figure out your hypothesis. Are you examining if raising your email frequency would result in more conversions? Maybe you would like to test if lowering the amount of emails you are sending out results in less people unsubscribing than normal.
Once you have divided your communications according to analytics (did you notice the allusion?), pick a group in your list to work as an example and use the email metrics given by your email provider such as open rate, delivery rate, cancellations, and click-through rate to figure out the present standards for that subsection. Construct a sequence of emails and transmit them according to the frequency you hypothesized (for example, escalating from once every two weeks to once a week). Once the exam has finished, compare the performance data from the test with the performance data from the frequency you were sending out previously. Do the results align with your hypothesis?
5) Decide Which Content to Use in Lead Nurturing Campaigns
Do you need help deciding what type of content to put in your email campaigns for lead nurturing? When constructing the relationship among the content you utilize and its correspondence to different stages in the sales process, it is best to supplement the content map with content that has achieved the best outcome. What is the best performing content among yours? You check your analytics, that’s how!
6) Segment Your Email Communications
Are you segmenting your email communication? Emails made more specifically to distinct audiences with segmentation bring in 50% more clicks compared to non-segmented emails, according to MarketingSherpa. If we don’t start segmenting now, then I don’t know what would be a good enough reason. If you desire to boost how your emails are performing through segmenting, what do you need? You guessed it: data!
You can categorise your email communications in various ways, depending on the characteristics of your business. This may include division by area, sector/function, topics of interest, stage in the sales process, etc. To identify which segmentation is suitable for your organisation, analyse the data you already have on hand. Examine the data you obtain from your prospects via lead acquisition forms and lead information. Identify the best way to organize your content based on your target audience, the data your viewers need from you, the queries they could be asking, or what step they are at in the purchasing process. The List Creation Tool from HubSpot simplifies the process of sorting emails, while the Marketing Automation Tool enables you to start an email campaign depending on a user’s specific action while they’re on your page.
