Setting Better Sales Goals with Analytics

Sales analytics signifies several things to different sales teams. It can represent hard data, or numerous statistics and data put together through your CRM system. It can also reflect pipeline forecasting, lead scoring and customer information analyses. Businesses can take advantage of sales analytics to set goals, motivate and assess sales performance. The use of marketing and sales analytics is a certain way to ensure business growth. Sales analytics is in fact not only about numbers. It can make your sales team more effective and productive.

What is Data-Driven Sales?
Data-driven sales involves the collection of data and use it during the entire sales process, from the products sold to the time of day they reach out to customers. The best data-driven sales teams closely monitor both the customer journey and the sales process.

By analysing every step of the the customer journey, your team can find out about their needs at every stage. Normally the information you need is: how a customer finds your products and what information they need to complete the purchase with your company.

Assessing the customer journey is the first thing to do. Your sales process needs to be evaluated as well. By getting hold of analytics such as, sales growth, lead conversion rate, sell-through rate and sales-per-rep, your company gets deeper insights that show how well your sales process works.



Why is Data-Driven Sales so Important?
There is no doubt that one of the main benefit of data-driven sales teams is increased profitability. According to a research by McKinsey&Company, companies that use sales analytics are 5-6% more profitable than their competitors are. Sales analytics can help your company:

Find out the real needs of your customers at different touch points
Provide ways to customize the customer journey
Recognize customer pain points
Expose strengths and weaknesses of sales reps
Find areas of improvement within your sales strategy


How can Analytics Improve Your Sales Strategy?
1. Sales Enablement -Powerful statistics derived from sales analytics can lead to sales enablement. This is another prevalent buzzword currently and it involves giving your sales team all the tools required to do their job amazingly well. These are modern, data-collecting tools, that are used in four primary areas, according to McKinsey&Company

2. Identifying the Right KPIs
Many companies struggle with this question: Should they give commissions and bonuses, based on sales figures, profits, or some other metric? It is important to note that a poorly chosen metric can lead to poor results. Big data and analytics can help identify the KPIs that are best aligned with business priorities and can help define granular metrics that can drive desired outcomes.



3. Use Your Sales Analytics Tools to Empower Your Mobile Workforce.
It is a good idea to provide your mobile workforce with real-time access to updated information and performance metrics. In this way, they are not affected by information lapses that might cost them a sale or waste their time on bad visits. Having the information, they need whenever required, they ar more efficient in their jobs.

Organizations should make sure that the metrics they use to reward reps are aligned with their strategic objectives. They need to set individual targets according to past performance and on the potential of each rep’s customer portfolio. Besides, they can encourage reps’ motivation by setting and revising targets aligned to customers’ purchasing cycles while conducting experiments to arrive at the optimal frequency.



4. Lead generation
It is certain that data explains who your best customers are. Knowing who your VIP clients are will allow you to make efforts to find more just like them. As you collect more leads, you might consider keeping a record to see which ones are most likely to convert.



5. Match the people
It is essential to have the right people doing the right jobs to increase productivity. For instance, data can show you which sales reps are performing better, or who has the highest closing rate. With such information, a company can put staff in fitting, more productive roles.



6. Maximize customer lifetime value
Having a 360-degree view of your customers will allow you to maximize their lifetime value. For example, you’ll be able to find more about inactive customers and make efforts to convince for more sales them before they leave.



7. Get the right price
Usually, most deals are lost because of budget, according to Hubspot. Having specific data helps you get insight into customer budgets and can provide flexible possibilities that are more likely to close a deal. For instance, you might offer payment plans, suggest lower or higher tiered services, or increase initial customer support to encourage more sales.



Conclusion
It is certain that sales analytics can help your company get numerous benefits. From getting to know your customers deeply on a more personal level to creating a sales enablement strategy that leverages the best talents of your team, data can become one of your most powerful business allies.

7 Powerful Strategies to Increase Sales and Revenue

Every business owners as well as their employees share one main concern: how to increase sales and boost revenue. From top-level management to bottom, everyone is serious about increasing sales numbers. There is no doubt that sales drive the business. It is what fuel the growth of any company and help to fund the new ventures.

The following strategies can be useful to help you increase sales and revenue:
•Create Clear Revenue Goals
•Focus on customer relationships
•Review Your Pricing Strategies
•Expand Your Distribution Channels
•Diversify Your Offerings to boost sales
•Use Cross Promotions
•Increase Your Marketing
1. Create Clear Revenue Goals
A good way to get started is to combine your given revenue targets with the market strategy you have created based on an assessment of the past and current situation to generate realistic revenue goals for territories and individuals. After that, it is important to find out which support your sales team needs to reach these goals. It is a good idea to get your marketing team, sales team, and product team together to work on a plan.

2. Focus on customer relationships
As per marketing metrics, increasing customer retention by five percent can increase profits between 25 and 95 percent. It is certain that offering a remarkable customer service creates long-term and loyal customers. This is a good strategy to grow your business. Upselling or cross-selling current customers is significantly more effective and cost-efficient than securing new clients.

3. Review Your Pricing Strategies
Take into account your pricing strategies if your product or service is price sensitive. Get to know what your competition is charging and raise or lower your prices based on your goals. For instance, lowering your prices can increase revenues to make up for lower margins while raising your prices can create a higher perceived value in the minds of consumers and increase your margins while raising your prices can also increase your revenues without increasing sales.

4. Expand Your Distribution Channels
Sometimes, altering where you sell your product can considerably increase your sales and revenues without needing any modifications to your marketing or pricing. Analyze carefully the effects of using online selling, direct mail, wholesalers, retailers, distributors and outside sales reps. Find out how each method can affect your sales volumes, profit margins and total profits. Keep in mind that in some cases, new distribution channels require marketing support.

5. Diversify Your Offerings to boost sales
If your company exists for several years, it might be time to add new products and services to create exponential growth. It might happen that you have saturated the marketplace. The next step is to determine the products your target customers buy that you are not selling and that you think you can make and market profitably. For instance, you might need to replace old products with new ones. As a result, it can lead to a decrease in sales, but higher revenues if the replacement product has a higher price.

6. Use Cross Promotions
It is obvious that the more people you have to promote your product or service, the more sales and revenues you’ll have. One way is to look for businesses that don’t compete with you but which have the same target customer and develop cross promotions. For instance, if you sell sports shoes, sponsor athletes to wear and promote your line. Another way to do more promotions is to collaborate with charities to get them to promote you to their supporters. Not to forget that social media is also a significant tool to build a following generated by satisfied customers.

7. Increase Your Marketing
There is no doubt that to boost your marketing in order to increase sales. Keep in mind that quantity doesn’t necessarily mean quality, hence careful planning, test-marketing and monitoring your results can greatly help to maximize your sales. Go for marketplace research to find out which messages speak to your target audience. Make sure to run ads and promotions in limited locations and check the results before spending your entire budget. Include some way to control marketing communications, such as using coupons, electronic codes or website traffic statistics.

Conclusion
It is essential that your sales team have clear priorities, clear outcomes everyone can measure, clear guidelines everyone can follow and clear goals towards which everyone can work. However, implementing strategies to increase sales and revenue requires not only the effort of your sales team but also the organization as a whole. The key lies in knowing how to reduce risks and exploit opportunities.