Often, Sales is considered a guessing game. Businesses come up with implementation strategies, never knowing whether their efforts are worthwhile. When the revenues grow, there comes an agreement that their methods are successful and continue to move on. If there isn’t much change, we see an adjustment in the approach until the teams close more deals.
However, technology has enabled sales teams to see precisely how their strategies are performing. They can monitor customer activities and link them to specific sales efforts by using analytics. With so many companies now using analytics to boost marketing and sales, companies that fail to adopt this technology will eventually find they're losing to competition. Here are the ways businesses can supercharge their sales by using business analytics.
Sales team management: Identifying patterns and drive action-oriented training to the team
Your CRM's potential insights are only useful if your sales team provides the system with accurate information. Once you have confidence in your data, you can analyze the patterns in the behavior of the opportunities in the movement through the sales funnel, and understand the successful techniques and actions that produce desired results. The software for sales analytics, including CRM, contains a range of data that allows for such evaluation with lead scoring and opportunity scoring. The analysis would yield specific actions in the sales process, which can drive your sales coaching and training practices. The insights from the analysis of sales data will answer questions like:
Which reps are struggling at identifying all the buying influences?
How to assign clear and balanced territories to reps and adjust as needed?
Answers to these questions can help you identify and suggest specific actions with successful outcomes or identify the need for guidance to the team. To give you an idea, sales analytics will point out whether an individual rep mainly has contacts in the technical roles, suggesting that he must work on the identification of other buying influences to engage prospects in the sales process earlier. Simply put, it sums up to the reliability of your data, and identification of trends that lead to desired results.
Sales effort effectiveness: Exercise data into everyday sales activities
Every company operates its sales team differently. A one-off product company does not have the same requirements as a company based on a recurring revenue model. Both companies, though, depend on their sales to reach revenues and profitability targets.
In addition to using insights from historical data for the improvement of your sales team performance, you can provide prescriptive guidance to sales professionals on how to improve their chances of making a sale. It can include strategic suggestions for market or account in a specific vertical where demand for a certain product is higher than others, or tactical ideas like product bundling and up-selling or cross-selling of some products that have sold well together in the past.
A salesperson often makes more than a hundred calls a day. Using data analytics can be very valuable for deal scoring, determining which opportunities are worth picking up and which ones should be a part of marketing nurture campaigns. The perception that specific calls would be more productive and successful will increase confidence and lead to better interaction with the customer and closing the deal.
Sales analytics can be useful for personal interactions, as well. For instance, sales professionals can use data to address pricing questions on the spot. The sales reps can gain tremendous credibility by showing average prices of recent sales for companies located in the same region, vertical or company sizes, to the current prospect. Often this is done on a mobile device during the meeting. Such types of data and analytic benchmarks allow the salesperson to understand how their customers pay attention to a specific price and how flexible and elastic they are in accommodating discounts.
Closing thoughts
In sales-oriented organizations, the role of data is shifting. It is evolving from management reporting to the development of a strategic tool for sales managers and sales teams. Nonetheless, this change requires overcoming the initial resistance to data quality and reliability barriers and gaining an organizational buy-in. With analytics as a motivator and incentive, the organization can ensure that sales managers and individual representatives are in control of their achievements. The organization can build a highly effective sales team that is capable of prioritizing, taking ownership and making good choices using data as a strategic tool to drive revenue and profits.
We, at Advaiya, help you with the right planning, implementation and adoption of business analytics and business applications tailored for your business, enabling you to make better decisions, deliver superior customer experience, increase productivity and induce technology-led innovation.
