As a business, you probably seek to outperform your expectations and make each year more profitable than the previous one. Yet, unfortunately, many companies struggle to meet their sales targets. 

And the reason is that they usually set unrealistic sales and revenue goals without accounting for changing variables. 

The sales strategy does not account for changing variables, such as

•  market fluctuations, 
• introducing a new product line, 
• or expanding into new territory. 

As a result, it may result in irrational, unreachable figures.

Your organization will have to work collaboratively to achieve its sales goals to become profitable. 

And how do you set these sales goals? 

You can't leave it up to imagination or focus on areas that you think are important.

You'll need reliable data. 

Did you know that adopting a data-driven strategy can also result in greater profitability - upwards of 6% compared to competitors?

Your business will require a sales analytics platform that considers past performance, insights, rep performance, and foresight based on corporate objectives to create sales goals effectively. A platform that links plans and data across the organization can allow businesses to create a more accurate forecast and more reachable sales goals.

What are sales goals?

Sales goals are sales targets set for a company's sales team. To implement successful sales goals, keep each team member's talents in mind. When setting sales goals for your sales staff, try to keep the following in mind:

1. Increasing sales to increase profitability for the company
2. Increasing sales rep productivity
3. Increased cross-selling and upselling
4. Customer retention and new customer acquisition
5. Improved time management:

 You can track sales goals with Convin’s Sales Monitoring System.

Why are sales goals important?

The sales goals you set as a business will serve as the foundation for intelligent marketing and sales decisions, ultimately leading to sales and growth. Having specific sales goals will increase the success of your sales team because

• It creates a sense of accountability. Having clearly defined sales targets holds everyone on your sales team responsible.
• Sales teams can visualize the company's growth. Targeted visualization is a robust tool for people to achieve their objectives.
• Setting sales targets encourages and drives sales representatives' regular work.
• Helps evaluate the sales team's performance. Setting sales goals is a simple approach to quantifying your progress.

Set ambitious sales goals for your sales team. Is a goal indeed a goal if it is overly conservative?

What is your present objective? 

What is the number you're thinking of? 

Why not try to double that, and if you're feeling adventurous, maybe even triple it. 

Now that you've established some truly challenging goals, it's essential to divide them into strategic sales goals and sales action plans that can help you boost sales KPIs. It would be best if you now broke down sales goals into activities for your sales teams so that you can achieve them. 

Yet, many businesses often struggle to create ambitious but reasonable goals to encourage salespeople to generate organic growth. Several companies are working to discover solutions to solve the issue: They are employing sophisticated sales analytics tools to determine the actual drivers of business outcomes and big data and machine learning to understand client demand with unparalleled precision and clarity. 

With reliable estimates, businesses can set more meaningful targets.

What is sales analytics?

Sales analytics tools are used to detect, analyze, explain, and anticipate sales patterns and results and assist sales management in determining where salespeople could improve. 

Sales analytic tools, in particular, promote discovery, diagnostic, and prediction activities by allowing the modification of parameters, measurements, dimensions, or figures as part of an analytic or planning activity.

Sales analytics and its effect on sales:

We've spoken so much about sales analytics and what it entails. Now, let's see how it works in a practical setting.

Everything is now available at the click of a button. Today, both sellers and buyers have access to a large amount of information.

As a result, both discover attractive opportunities without relying on one another.

In terms of the sales function, it has moved from intuitive and relationship-driven to a purposeful and informed approach. Sales representatives no longer rely on customer feelings but on sales analytics tools that help discover the best-selling opportunities. 

Sales are now determined by data-driven strategies that have transformed sales into a proactive rather than reactive role. Data reshaped sales teams and their objectives, allowing for additional sales opportunities that were previously out of reach.

Another pivotal moment in the sales industry is integrating customer data with sales analytics, and it generates a new sales technique and viewpoint that improves customer experience.

How to use sales analytics tools to boost your business?

If your company isn't currently utilizing sales analytics tools, you're likely hearing the following from your team:

We're having trouble closing sales. 

We're missing deadlines. 

We're not selling nearly enough!

Every salesperson encounters these stumbling hurdles, and they are challenging to overcome. But there is some good news: you already have the tools you need to overcome them: sales analytics tools.

You can even uncover why your sellers are not closing more deals by listening to their sales conversations. One of the best ways to do this is by analyzing the conversation using Convin’s Conversation analytics software.

Consider your sales career. As a salesperson, you've likely experienced failures and speed bumps; you've evaluated them to figure out where you went wrong and applied what you've learned to future sales. In a sense, that's sales analytics, and with a rigorous approach, you can scale the sales analytics reports to help your sales team succeed.

Sales analytics tools examine sales data closely to answer critical questions such as:

• Are we the most effective sales team we can be? And if we aren't, how are we going to get there?
• How can we maximize our sales resources while lowering our selling costs?
• What are the changes in consumer expectations and industry standards, and what can we do to fulfill them?
• How can we become innovative disruptors in our industry?

According to McKinsey research, businesses that evaluate and act on sales behaviour may increase their sales productivity by 20%. 

But what sales analytics metrics should you be keeping track of? 

How can you turn these sales analytical metrics into insights? 

And what do you do with intelligence once you've obtained it?

I know it seems like a lot but don't worry. Putting sales analytics tools to use is quite simple when you have a strategy.

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Types of sales analytics

Sales analytics is a critical activity in sales operations and is divided into four categories:

Descriptive: 

Involves gathering previous sales-related data to comprehend overall sales progress better. This sales analytics metric employs summary points shown by graphs and charts, such as the year-over-year reduction in sales for the product.

Diagnostic: 

This sales analytic metric assembles the critical determinants of previous sales performance. In this stage, you investigate why sales increased or decreased. It also entails providing plausible explanations for prior trends and data mining to determine the core reason. For example, the competitor's product is driving product X out of the market due to low customer retention.

Predictive: 

This sort of sales analytic metric anticipates future scenarios. Data is compiled and put into software that forecasts the future based on historical patterns and statistics.

Prescriptive: 

After receiving the predicted findings, it's time to design an effective strategy. Sales managers propose essential action items and a game plan to guide salespeople to achieve the target. It also entails comprehending the possible consequences of the decisions.

Sales analytics use cases

According to a Mckinsey survey of over 1,000 sales firms worldwide,

"53% of those who are high performing regard themselves as successful users of sales analytic tools."

According to the survey, fast-growing businesses employ robust sales data more successfully, but most organizations struggle.

Forward-thinking businesses use data and sales analytics tools to boost value generation in the B2B and B2C sectors. Following a sales, analytics guide provides valuable insights into analytics metrics and increases responsibility.

Who can use sales analytics?

Most teams benefit from using sales analytics.

🔹 Managers and Sales Operations: 

The sales operations team is primarily responsible for data compilation, data quality, and forecasting. Using sales analytics tools can help maintain an up-to-date CRM with the most recent information. It also saves time on pipeline preparation, identifies deal hazards, and automates reporting from a single data source. As a result, sales analytics guarantees that GTM teams are on the same page throughout the process.

🔹 Marketing: 

Automated CRMs record all data that may be shared across teams. The data pulls together marketing, sales, and customer success to close transactions. It provides insights into transaction risk, allowing marketers to tailor ABM initiatives accordingly. Furthermore, it demonstrates the impact of marketing on sales.

🔹 Finance: 

Thorough insights and trends assist the finance team in budget management and allocation. The primary revenue measures help the CFO understand the dynamics at work.

Steps to implement a sales analytic strategy: 

Enhancing your sales process with in-depth analytics is a great goal, but getting it isn't always easy. Here's a four-step method for launching your first sales analytics strategy.

Step 1: Identify the issue and devise a solution.

You can't fix an issue unless you know what it is. Create a hypothesis that you will be able to test or reject by collecting sales figures and running them through analytics to observe trends.

Here are a few good examples of actionable questions:

• Which sales activity results in the most significant number of closed deals?
  ‍
• What channels do your most valuable customers use to contact you?
  ‍
• Is attracting new customers or upselling to existing ones a more viable option?

Step 2: Gather your sales metrics.

Begin collecting data with your question in mind. Here are a few things to remember:

• Which indicators are unquestionably crucial to resolving your question?
• Which sales analytics metrics are likely to be helpful? 
• How frequently should you monitor data? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?
• Do you need to monitor data for a certain amount of time, or should it be a continuous activity?

The answers to the preceding questions will vary depending on the analytical output you seek.

And lastly, how will you organize your data? Will you do it manually on a spreadsheet, or will you utilize sales analytics tools to save time and effort?

Realize that to have reliable analytics, you must first have reliable data. Make sure you're collecting all possible data sources so that the ensuing analytical insights genuinely represent the status of your sales organization.

Step 3: Make use of sales analytics tools

It's now time to turn that sales data into analytics. You can use a spreadsheet to do it manually, but CRM analytics tools make the process faster, easier, and more straightforward.

Nobody enjoys looking at rows of statistics; boring. You can use interactive dashboards to illustrate your analytics with sales analytic tools. Seeing data in picture form (and being able to go in to study nitty-gritty details beyond surface-layer visualization) might help you uncover trends you would not have noticed otherwise. 

If you have any data science wizards on staff, now is the moment to leverage them to ensure you aren't missing any potential insights.

Here's a quick rundown of some valuable sales analytics tools.
1. Convin

Convin is a sales analytics platform that leverages conversation intelligence to assist the sales force in closing more transactions by

The sales analytics platform helps assess what works for your representatives on calls, identify the best tips and reproduce them throughout the organization. They also help get new employees up to speed using real-world call examples that have proven effective in the past.

We all know mistakes are inevitable. However, the leader must assist the team members in correcting their errors. Calvin helps businesses identify areas for improvement on calls so that they can appropriately teach the team. They also use calls to understand the market better and direct your product and marketing teams to market leadership.
2. Salesforce Tableau

Salesforce is a popular CRM and data analytics platform. It's a data management and sales analytics application that allows you to act on data within the context of your whole CRM ecosystem. Salesforce analytics provide a wide range of investigations, including predictive insights, and Salesforce dashboards make it simple to see results.
3. HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub, like Salesforce, is a sophisticated and user-friendly sales analytics platform that provides HubSpot's complete CRM system. It's a good choice for small enterprises.
4. Clari 

Clari's sales analytics tools include many of the functions you'd expect from a regular CRM and data analytics platform and appealing dashboards and deeper dives into your sales funnel to see how transactions are moving.
5. Zoho

Zoho's analytics platform has grown in popularity due to its low cost and ease of use. Zoho is best suited for companies that generate most of their sales from social media. Zoho has comprehensive social media lead generation and monitoring services that can assist you in keeping track of postings relevant to your organization.

Step 4: Put your insights to use

Now that you've gathered your sales and analytics findings, it's time to compare them to your original question.

Do your findings address the question you presented at the beginning? If so, that's fantastic!

It's time to take those results, introduce them to the appropriate decision-makers, and use them to assist in accelerating changes to your sales operations. But don't stop collecting data:

Once you've made adjustments based on your findings, you'll want to revisit the sales analytics metrics to ensure the changes have the desired effect.

If somehow the analytical insights don't address the question you had in mind, it's time to start over. Rethink your question, get new data, and repeat the analytics. Iterate on your hypothesis until you get the solution you need.

Wrapping up

Sales data analysis might seem intimidating, but it doesn't have to be. When your efforts are not concentrated, the procedure is challenging. On the other hand, sales analytics boost overall sales performance when combined with the correct strategy, intelligent tools, and precise recommendations.

Remember that the best sales approach is one that is constantly developing. Newmarket elements, sales metrics, sales performance, and so on will be introduced over time.

As a result, optimizing the sales strategy using a sales analytics platform aids in decision-making and propelling the company to new heights. Finally, it can help you meet your sales targets and establish a loyal consumer base.

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