If you’ve decided to purchase or upgrade your Sales Performance Management (SPM) solution you know already that the investment value is greater than simply cool dashboards that display who is selling what and when. But have you stepped back to consider what sales analytics, data, and insight are most important to mark success or areas of concern? The good news is that with a customizable platform, every activity can be measured. The brainwork is understanding what’s important and how often you need to tap into this.
This whistle-stop blog highlights the magnificent seven metrics of the sales analytics sector. In short, the hit list of what you should be measuring.
Your Top Five Sales Analytics
1. Percentage of Sales Team Hitting Quotas
This is your foundation for all other metrics. Seeing and understanding who is fulfilling their quota not only provides the picture of which people are hitting their targets, but will give context as to why someone may be struggling or finding the job a bit too easy. By utilizing quota and territory software as part of your sales analytics toolbox, you can adjust quotas, and use the data and reporting to inform performance-related conversations and make them more evidence-based. Looking at this metric in broader terms, you can understand if a quota has been set at too ambitious a level.
2. Conversion/Prospect-to-Customer Rate
Let’s sidestep to another big benchmark piece of reporting, which is conversion and win rates. Rather than relying on guesswork or probability to calculate how many leads are required to hit targets, you can attain a much more accurate idea of what those percentages and numbers are likely to be with revenue intelligence software. And it’s not just about getting the metric correct – it’s making sense of the background noise, such as if there’s any leakage from your current sales pipeline which will impact on powering on to the next stage. You can also use this platform to gauge your sales team’s performance, whether that’s on an individual or group basis. This software can also help to create possible “scenarios” so you can play out a move outside of real-time, then apply it to increase those critical conversion rates. The desire is always to make informed decisions based on the sales analysis, and the more robust the software, the more certainty you have when taking action.
3. Sales Growth, Target, and Revenue
What do any of these sales analytics side orders mean without the meat for mains? To reiterate, metrics are not just about accurate representations of current sales patterns, but also value-rich reflections of past sales figures as well as indicators of future forecasting. Your critical metrics must include how close to target both people and products are, what that growth pattern looks like and how much revenue is being pulled in. Zooming out further, these are the numbers needed to either support KPIs or make a case reviewing them. While many sales analysts draw the line at producing daily reports (except for product launch times, or during a special pricing event), you can set the parameters over a month, quarter, or year.
4. Product Performance
Let’s be honest; if you’re not selling stuff, there will be no metrics to compare, so this one has earned its place in the sales analytics priority list. At any given time, it’s important to understand where a product is selling; how much is shifting in one place compared to other territories, and what the competitor landscape looks like. Whether you want to track a single item over multiple locations or a product range in one area, product performance is the ballast that will keep your sales ship on a steady path. Getting this right brings us back to the usefulness of knowing your territories, and how quickly you can react and respond to any spikes detected when analyzing a report. Using this intelligence, you can then make a call on how to better market a product or change strategy altogether.
5. Customer Insight
You’re all good with knowing how sales analytics impacts your team, business, and product, thanks to this renewed love of sales analytics, but there is one more factor in this top five. That’s how metrics can reveal a stronger customer identity and persona. Again, this cannot be achieved by alchemy or dumping a sales executive in an unknown town for six months, then asking them to write a report on how friendly the locals were. As well as pulling out reports on the ebb and flow of a territory and the sales patterns of a product at any given time, greater insight in this area comes down to data science and how that can be applied. This way, you avoid the cliché of trying to sell retirement products in a college town (and other poorly thought-out sales strategies) and can utilize the analytics to get a more granular picture of your customer’s desires and budgetary limits.
We know that the list of useful metrics is subjective and can be exhaustive when you start to think about it, but by paying attention to these five key areas, you’re at least starting to make the most of what a great piece of SPM software can offer your business and bottom line.
Find out more about Varicent’s sales analytics solutions here, and by booking a demo today.
