Sales Data Gathering
As a growing small or medium business, when is it a good time to start gathering & analyzing sales data?
Chris Massie
Growing a business from an idea into a thriving, profitable enterprise takes a mixture of skill, hard work, determination, the right things happening at the right time, and a strong business strategy.
Businesses rarely have sales structure and organization built in from the outset. As your growing business stretches toward new possibilities, you have likely patch-worked together who does what, how new opportunities and tasks are managed, and what you use to track those things.
It’s far from efficient, but this cobbled-together approach can actually get you pretty far!
When business owners reach out to us, it’s usually because they have the desire to level up their sales and profits – to operate more smoothly, efficiently, and effectively. They are tired of the guessing games and want to free their salespeople to do what they do best.
If this sounds like your business, congratulations! It means you’ve reached the threshold where better sales management is not just compelling, but crucial, for your future growth.
Chris Massie
Sales Data Questions
However, even if your system is working “well enough”, but you notice the following symptoms, it is probably time to start gathering and analyzing your sales data:
• You don’t know why your sales and profits fluctuate the way they do
• ”Tracking” means relying on your salespeople’s memories of interactions
• It’s difficult for your salespeople to share information with one another
• Your salespeople are spending a lot of time doing admin work
• Sales opportunities are slipping through the cracks
• You want to be more intentional and strategic about growth
• You want to spend your resources on what actually matters
• You aren’t sure why, but you feel that not every opportunity is being acted on
Improve your success by analyzing data that matters now.
By avoiding sales data today, small and medium businesses gamble their future. Without sales data to guide a business, one scenario is that sales continue to grow and eventually become unruly. With more sales interactions that aren’t tracked properly, it means more opportunities are lost without enough information to understand why or how. Strategic decisions become impossible, and so much good historical data has already been lost.
Another scenario is that a business’s sales begin to stagnate, and sales data only becomes compelling when revenue has decreased so much that there is now a looming sense of panic. By this point, gathering and examining sales metrics feels more like conducting an autopsy than wielding a powerful strategic tool. It’s likely that precious resources have gone to the wrong places, and an opportunity for meaningful growth has been squandered!
What gets measured, gets managed. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or you have a sales team, it’s never too early to begin gathering sales data. Metrics help you see historical and current trends, fluctuations, and anomalies clearly. With these insights, you are better able to understand what’s working well, what may be a waste of time and resources, and how to make strategic sales decisions for the future. Sales data is the currency for the growth of your business.
An added bonus of a CRM is that your salespeople will spend less time trying to recall interactions with potential and current customers, digging up emails and scrolling through spreadsheets. A good CRM stores the most important sales information and makes tracking it quick and easy.
Our CRM is awesome because we understand that your salespeople are set up to succeed when they can collaborate and are most efficient when they’re out there doing what they do best.
So what do you think… is it time for a CRM?
Are you ready for a CRM to help you up-level your sales?
We offer a FREE 30-day trial for our uniquely simple, customizable CRM designed for small and medium businesses just like yours. Click below to create an account and get started!
Sales Data FAQ
What is Sales Data?
You may have heard the term sales data and wondered what exactly it means, and what it might mean for your sales teams and sales leaders.
Sales data refers to any sort of information that can be readable by a machine and is also beneficial information for the sales team at a company.
It can be very helpful information because it can assist the sales team and business owner with decision-making, a better understanding of your customer base, and improving the future performance of your team and business.
There are a few types of sales data– revenue per sale, average customer lifetime value, revenue by product, and more. Many times, sales data is the electronic data that is collected from card transactions or related to card transactions from your customers. This is one of the easiest ways you can collect sales data.
What is the meaning of sales data?
Sales data is a term that means data that is machine-readable, and also is information that can be helpful for the sales team to learn from. There are different types of sales data, such as average customer lifetime value and net promoter score– among many other kinds of sales data.
All of these are considered sales data because they are information that can be measured during the sales process. Sales data can be collected through card transactions at your place of business or through your online invoicing system.
Sales data is important because it can be used to improve things such as your sales approach and your product or service offerings. It is important data that can be a great learning tool for the sales and marketing teams at a company.
For example, sales data helps to offer an understanding of what products are selling and which ones are not, as well as why your customers or clients are behaving a particular way.
Why is sales data important?
So, why is sales data so important in the first place?
It is important that you understand why sales data is being collected and how it is being used so that you can utilize it properly in your business. Sales data can be analyzed to provide plenty of clues and actionable steps to take in your business. A data drive sales team will always outperform and non-data drive sales team. A data drive sales approach will win each time.
For instance, it can help you to determine when things are not working and it is time to pivot your company. It can also help you to protect your cash flow and make informed decisions in many different parts of your business.
Of course sales data is very important to the sales and marketing teams specifically. By analyzing what products are selling and which are not, your sales team can make informed decisions on which products or services they should push in their marketing campaigns.
It can also be very telling of what direction to go in for new product offerings as the business grows.
How do you find sales data?
Sales data can be crucial in understanding your business and your customer base as well. So, how do you find it? Sales data can be accessed in a few different ways.
One of the ways that sales data is collected is during card transactions with your customers. It is easy to look at factors such as revenue per sale or revenue by product when looking at all the data collected every time your customers swipe their cards!
There are also ways that you can get more data and information when you are first starting out so that you can make wise decisions as you build your company and as it– hopefully– grows.
If you do not have a lot of transactions to pull from, you can start out with a preliminary market survey to ensure that you have product market fit and are going in the right direction. This can be done by working with a professional market research firm, or by polling a random group of consumers if you do have a pool to pull from.
How is sales data used in marketing?
Sales data is something that is very helpful when it comes to sales or marketing. It can be informative for these facets of the business.
So, how exactly is it used, anyway? Sales data helps to make clear things like customer patterns, the customer journey through the sales funnel, and more. Plus, it can also tell you information about your products, services, and sales approach.
This can tell you which products are getting a good customer response, and which are not. From there, you and your marketing team can start to make decisions.
Some of these decisions can be whether to push the products that are not doing well in your marketing campaign– so that you can offload that product– or to continue to push the big sellers in order to make more sales.
Some of the sales data can also be used in marketing literature like brochures or charts and graphics. Sales data that shows you what you are doing that customers respond well to– especially approaches that you respond well to– can be particularly helpful for this sort of marketing literature.
What is an example of sales data?
Sales data can encompass a lot of different kinds of data. It is essentially an umbrella term but refers to all of the different measurable data that can be collected from card transactions and sales to your customers and clients.
In order to fully understand what is measured by sales data, here are a few examples. The revenue per sale (or the amount of money that one customer spends on one transaction) is one type of sales data.
Another example of sales data is revenue per product (the amount of money that one particular product is bringing in for the company, across the board).
Sales data can be a great way to step back and look at all of your products and services more objectively and make decisions that may otherwise be difficult if you are letting any sentimentality get involved– decisions such as sidelining a product that you love, but which is not doing well.
