Sales Performance Analysis
Sales Performance Analysis closes the gap on your entire Sales Cycle. Essentially, performance analysis is a deep look back over certain elements of your sales cycle, from Opportunity Management to Account Planning. Looking at the numbers, ratios, and time frames of your sales cycle provides many useful benefits.
To begin with, analysis allows you to question the entire cycle – and adjust it accordingly. You can determine if sales goals are too high or too low. Analysis gives you an accurate picture of your forecast – is it realistic or does it need to be adjusted? You can also decide if the time and money spent on clients in Opportunity Management was worthwhile – as opposed to the profit gained from the sale. But consider the effects of analysis from the human resources point of view: a thorough analysis gives you hard data that can be used to coach and train the workforce more effectively. Let’s look at how to use sales analysis to close the gap on SCM. (more…)
Sales Analytics
It’s easy to say that a great salesperson is that person who continually closes, and this is true to a great extent. But in a new economic environment, a closed sale is not necessarily the sole measure for effectiveness of the salesperson and the sales presentation. There are several ways to measure sales and all of them can be used together to get a good picture. In addition, you can use a combination of metrics to determine how to set goals – and how to coach salespeople in the meantime.
One of the most common sales analytics is revenue. For a business with only a few products and a few salespeople, it’s also a relatively simple leap to determine how much of the revenue was brought in through the sales force. But as products become more complicated and as the sales force spreads geographically, this determination is harder to make. The idea of using revenue as a sales metric is to take the total revenue and then break it down to relevant units, such as division, product, region, or salesperson. Once you have a hold on the numbers, you can determine how much revenue is generated by each product – and by each salesperson. (more…)
