Sales Metrics Analysis: The Key to Better Sales Results

Retail is one of the most vulnerable industries to changing consumer demands and a volatile economic environment. In such circumstances, you need to regularly analyze your company's performance and make quick adjustments to achieve your monthly sales goals.?

In this article, I'll give you some examples of sales indicators that you need to track to stay on top of your sales success, as well as three analysis methods.?

What sales metrics should you look at??

Sales metrics are quantitative statistics that help you evaluate a salesperson's, a sales team's, the entire organization's (sales productivity metrics), the sales process or a specific part of it (sales performance metrics) against specified goals.?

Many of our?clients are faced with the challenge of deciding which sales metrics to track among the dozens accessible due to the amount of all-encompassing sales data. I suggest that organizations carefully identify specific KPIs based on their industry and short- and long-term business goals, as it is essential to study the right indicators to discover critical information about your sales process.?

The following are some of the most popular sales KPIs I recommend to track:?

Conversion rate/win rate?

This sales performance metric displays the percentage of leads who become customers and is used to anticipate your revenue goals. The conversion rate also indicates how effective your sales operations are: if the win rate is increasing while the number of closed deals remains the same or increases, your sales team's performance is improving.?

Average deal size?

To figure out the average deal size, divide the total revenue from closed deals by the total number of deals. This measure is particularly important for organizations looking to move upscale: the larger the deal size, the closer the company is to corporate contracts.?

Sales-to-cost ratio ?

Calculate your sales-to-cost ratio to determine the profitability of a sale. You do this by comparing the profit you get from the deal to the cost of getting it. If you find that the money you generate from closing a deal is insufficient to pay your expenses, you must take immediate action, such as looking for ways to cut costs, shorten your sales cycle, reconsider your target market, and so on.?

Sales funnel leakage?

Your sales funnel is made up of a number of steps, each of which can lead to a sale being won or lost. Only by tracking your stage-by-stage conversion will you be able to predict when your leads will stop doing business with you. The greater your conversion funnel's winning rate, the faster you can identify and root out weak parts.?

How can sales metrics be tracked and analysed??

The difficulty becomes providing business users with smooth and fast access to their analysis after the essential sales KPIs to evaluate are specified. To do so, you'll need to create a productive sales analysis environment and implement the appropriate software. Here are some popular internal alternatives:?

Microsoft Excel?

Excel's merits include its suitability as a personal solution for evaluating historical data, as well as its affordability and relative ease of mastery. The tool, on the other hand, is ineffective for collaboration and forecasting. Furthermore, all of the data must be manually input into Excel, which takes a long time and can lead to multiple errors. As a result, the analysis' accuracy will be severely harmed.?

Analytics capabilities of your CRM/sales management tool?

A CRM system that gathers all-encompassing information on your clients from a variety of sources can assist you in gaining actionable insights that are critical to meeting your sales targets. You can learn about the most valuable communication channels, the cost of recruiting clients, the finest up-selling and cross-selling chances, and much more. But, to be honest, not every CRM software can do this. If your CRM offers the following features, it can be considered effective for the analysis of sales:?

• Large analytical skills that help with customer segmentation, marketing and sales process optimization, predict difficulties as they reach the sales pipeline, and so on.?
• For doing complete sales analysis, powerful integration capabilities to link to data sources (ecommerce platform, social media, retail software, etc.) are required.?
• To ensure good data quality, set up data management practices.?
• To get a visual snapshot of the metrics, use intuitive viewing.?
• Solution for self-service business intelligence?

You gain the following benefits with a well-designed and tuned self-service BI solution:?

A central store for sales data that has been consolidated and purified from internal corporate applications as well as external data sources. That way, you will have access to all of the data you will need to gain a complete picture of the sales process.?

Data science and machine learning capabilities that are used to your sales data to uncover the answers to the most deliberate inquiries. You can get detailed recommendations on how to improve the performance of your sales team, what stages of your sales pipeline require immediate adjustments, and what corrective actions to your sales funnel will bring maximum ROI, in addition to understanding the reasons behind certain sales performance.?

Functionality for visualization and reporting of self-service?

You gain the following benefits with a well-designed and tuned self-service BI solution:?

• ??A central store for sales data that has been consolidated and purified from internal corporate applications as well as external data sources. That way, you'll have access to all of the data you'll need to gain a complete picture of the sales process.?
• Data science and machine learning capabilities that are used to your sales data to uncover the answers to the most deliberate inquiries. You can get detailed recommendations on how to improve the performance of your sales team, what stages of your sales pipeline require immediate adjustments, and what corrective actions to your sales funnel will bring maximum ROI, in addition to understanding the reasons behind certain sales performance.?
• Sales analytics at your fingertips thanks to self-service visualisation and reporting capability. You may track your key sales KPIs in real time to conduct benchmarking, establish roadblocks to reaching your sales quota, and gain insights into how to enhance your sales team's performance and the entire sales process with comprehensive and easy-to-digest reports and dashboards.?

The secret to ?successful selling

The correct analytics solution, in my opinion, is the key to keeping competitive in the market by making quick and precise judgments. Some of the in-house solutions for tracking and evaluating sales metrics were described in the article. However, an in-house solution isn't the only option. If implementing an analytics system in-house is not an option, you may always outsource it. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you need assistance determining which sales analytics tool is best for you.