Sales analytics assist sales leaders in determining the role and effectiveness of their sales reps throughout the sales process. Sales analytics identify, model, understand and predict sales trends and outcomes, all while helping sales managers and VPs to better understand where to make improvements or pivot their approach.
Sales analytic systems provide functionality that supports discovery, diagnostic and predictive exercises, enabling the manipulation of parameters, measures, dimensions or figures as part of an analytical or planning activity.
To realize effective results from using sales analytics to improve productivity, you will have to ensure data federation and eminence are integral to environments. These elements must be in place to set up competent sales analytics operations.
Key Metrics Monitored Include
Here are some of the essential sales analytic tools you can leverage to inform your productivity; these analytics solutions include but is not limited to:
- Conversion rate
- Gross revenue
- Qualified prospects
- Sales growth
- Sales target
- Average sales revenue
- Length of the sales cycle
Diagnosis, Development and Coaching
With sales analytics, your sales reps provide you with measurable outputs that associate accurately with their performance. These tools ultimately help leaders diagnose and, subsequently, develop and coach employees through performance issues. Here are three of the most critical sales analytics that can improve productivity.
Sales productivity tools help you manage your sales teams most efficiently and productively at scale. Here are a few sales analytics tools to help improve productivity:
- Time-savings or time-commoditizing. Some apps address the different ways we prioritize time. You can help streamline your reps’ workflow to optimize their time—other timesaving applications work by automating repetitive tasks.
- Optimization of the selling process, ranging from lead generation solutions, a CRM platform, or an e-signature tool.
- Communication optimization. Both internal and client-facing communication.
- Integrating your salespeople with other departments is a sales productivity tool; these solutions help align sales with the product and marketing departments.
Top-performing sales teams use 5x as many sales tools when compared to their less significant competitors. Teams that deploy sales analytics solutions effectively generate more leads and convert more leads into sales at a higher rate.
Bolster Customer Relationship Management
Today’s sales teams require software that can process and efficiently organize customer relationships so that data-driven insights can be used effectively at scale. But sales also involves administrative tasks like responding to emails. Sales tools can also assist with reclaiming some of this time to be leveraged on more critical tasks. Your sales reps also need tools to communicate and collaborate. And with many businesses operating remotely (or semi-remotely), these communication tools have become even more essential.
Productivity is a broad term for a simple concept; it essentially refers to getting things done. There are many ways to improve productivity. Some of the productivity approaches include but are not limited to the following:
- Time Tracking & Accountability
- Communication, Collaboration & Training
- Lead generation & Sales Intelligence
- Project Management
- Scheduling
- Sales Content Management and CRM
- Closing tools
The ultimate sales analytics to improve the productivity approach is relationship building with your customers, otherwise known as customer relationship management (CRM). That’s the secret to turning one-time interactions into loyal, lifetime brand advocates; this should be your primary focus; finding tools that facilitate this transaction type. Nurture leads and connections and use your tools to deliver an exceptional experience every time.
And remember to mitigate short-term solutions as much as possible when you address structural problems. There are no automation tools or quick answers for fixing toxic leadership, unrealistic sales goals that aren’t aligned with organizational priorities, or poor technology implementations.
