How to Make Better Sales Using Data-Driven Sales Analytics?

In the age of data where everything is driven by the power of data and analytics, how can sales stay behind in the race? The sales team in an organization can avail several benefits of sales analytics as it represents hard data, or numerous statistics and data put together through the CRM system.

Sales analytics can also present pipeline forecasting, lead scoring and customer information analyses. Organizations at any level can reap the advantage of data driven sales analytics to set goals, motivate and assess sales performance. Its primary use is to drive business growth.

Data-Driven Sales

It involves the collection of data and uses it during the entire sales process. The team involved in data-driven sales closely monitors both the customer journey and the sales process. Through analysis of the complete customer journey, the team can extract the information about their needs at every stage.

Additionally, the sales processes need to be evaluated as well. Understanding the analytics of sales growth, lead conversion rate, sell-through rate, and sales-per-rep, the company digs into deeper insights to know how well its sales process works.

The necessity for Data-Driven Sales

•  It increases profitability

•  Help find out the real needs of customers at different touch points

•  Provides ways and methods to customize the customer journey

•  Identify customer pain points

•  Exposes strengths and weaknesses of sales representatives

•  Spot the areas of improvement within the company's sales strategy

Role of Analytics in Improving Sales Strategy and Goals

•  The strengthened statistics derived from sales analytics can drive sales enablement which involves giving the sales teams all the tools required to do their job efficiently.

•  Also several companies struggle to figure out on what basis they should give commissions and bonuses – on sales figures, profits, or some other metric. The companies should keep one thing in mind that they should not choose poor metric which can lead to poor results. Using big data and analytics, companies can identify the KPIs best aligned with business priorities. This can further help in defining granular metrics subsequently driving desired outcomes.

•  Companies can also use sales analytics tools to provide their mobile workforce with real-time access to updated information and performance metrics. Through they will not suffer from information lapses which can make them waste their time on bad visits. If they will have information whenever they need them, they can be more efficient with their jobs and performances.

•  The metrics use to reward reps should be aligned with their strategic objectives. The companies need to set individual targets as per their past performances and potential of their individual customer portfolio. By setting and revising targets aligned to customers' purchasing cycles, organizations can motivate reps.

•  As data explains who are the best customers of a company, knowing its VIP clients can enable its sales representatives to make more efforts to find more like them. After the collection of more leads, one can use records to understand which ones are more likely to convert.

•  For the smooth functioning of an organization, it is necessary to assign the right job to the right person which can increase productivity. Data, for example, can depict which sales representatives are performing better or have the highest closing rate. Using such information. The organization can assign staff with more productive roles.

•  It is necessary to have 360 views of the customers to maximize their lifetime value. For example, the sales team can understand more about inactive customers and make more efforts to convince them before they leave.

•  According to Hubspot, most deals are lost because of the budget. To curb this, if a company has specific data it can help it get insight into customer budgets. This further provides flexible possibilities that are expected to close a deal.

It is extremely clear that data-driven sales can help companies get numerous benefits and make it grow in this competitive atmosphere.