Analytics Made Easy to Understand in This Beginner’s Guide

By Ingage. 

A beginner’s guide to data analytics gives insights on how to better interpret statistics and apply them for future revenue. 

What’s the importance of data analytics? It’s common knowledge that companies want it, but why? Besides using the information collected to help improve performance for apps and websites, it can also be used for sales purposes. Sales analytics may seem daunting and incomprehensible but there’s no need to worry! Jim Johnson of ContractorCoachPRO, created a beginner’s guide to break down logistics and strategy. 

Where do you start with sales analytics? 

Many companies out there don't collect a lot of data, so it’s important to set a starting point of where you are right now and then create a benchmark of where you want to be and where you want to improve. This is called a KPI, or key performance indicator. 

Track KPIs 

The idea is to only track the main KPIs so you aren’t overwhelmed with endless amounts of data. KPIs are the indicators that can tell if you’re on track or not with your vision or mission. Once you can identify trends, you can then make adjustments to either double down on something that's working or address an issue before it becomes a bigger problem. 

Look at data points 

When you look at your sales data, you want to be able to see things like how raising your price a little affects your overall sales. You also want to track the productivity and effectiveness of your sales reps by using data points. Ingage gives you the ability to see what’s happening in the field, how a presentation is going and whether a particular slide is helping productivity and effectiveness or not. You can see who’s spending a lot of time on a certain slide and compare that to those who aren’t. This gives you clear insight into what’s working and what needs adjusted.  

Top sales KPIs to track 

Employee turnover rate 

Sales analytics begin with tracking your sales team. Are they happy at work and feel like they’re a part of building something bigger? Are you retaining reps or hiring new people too often? Your employee happiness and turnover rate are two indicators of how well your people are working for you. If your people are not happy at work and your turnover rate is too high, you want to take time to determine if it’s due to leadership, culture or your people not being challenged enough. 

Cost per lead 

A valuable sale analytic to track is cost per lead, or CPL. Tracking your CPL helps you determine if your marketing spend is effective or not. Cost per lead is a simple equation where you take what you spent divided by the number of leads you bring in. By tracking your lead sources, you can understand your ROI per lead source and the amount of money you’re spending on each one. This allows you to make decisions on which lead sources are working and which ones you can eliminate. 

Closing percentage 

Another key indicator to track is your closing percentage, which is the number of opportunities that you have divided by conversions, contracts or wins. By analyzing your sales pipeline, you can predict the success of your closing percentage. Sales is about transitioning leads into orders, and you can track that through each lead, appointment, presentation, estimate, contract and order. Your key performance indicators can indicate where you may be failing in the sales pipeline. Then you can manage the process, make adjustments to areas that you aren’t focusing enough on and train your people on how to get better results - all of which will improve your closing percentage.  

Velocity of process 

The velocity of process is tracking leads from start to finish through the marketing funnel. You can look at indicators such as how long a lead watches a Facebook video ad and how many take action after. Then, you use that data to predict how many and when your leads will come in.  

Types of buyers 

Jim Johnson’s favorite feature of Ingage is that it makes tracking data so much easier. Tracking the data in Ingage can yield various data points that other presentation platforms can’t deliver on. Google slides, PowerPoint, flipbooks and other platforms are linear presentations where you follow the format from A to Z. But Ingage gives you the ability to navigate non-linearly, meaning you can go directly to the sections that are important to a particular buyer based on the discussion the sales rep has with them. This is important because while customers may want to take different paths, analytics can help break customers down into three main types of personalities to better sell to them: 

• Impulse buyers – customers who are quick to buy when something catches their interest. They aren’t concerned with value or quality as much as seeing something and wanting it. 
• Cautious buyers - customers who weigh all the options before making a decision. They want to know all the facts, make comparisons, and look at every angle before committing.  
• Frugal buyers – Their biggest objective is saving money. Cost matters more than quality for them. 

It’s important to understand each type of buyer and how to present to them. You don’t need to spend a lot of time with an impulse buyer. But cautious buyers will require much more time, and frugal buyers need more convincing to buy your product. Knowing these types of buyers allows you to track data points on where your reps are spending the most time on their presentations depending on the type of buyer they’re working with and compare the successful sales to the ones that aren’t. Then, you can train your people to better engage different types of customers by tailoring the presentation to customer type based on the data.  

Slugging percentage 

An important number in sales analytics is the slugging average of your reps. This is the net sale per lead issued and gives you valuable information about the decisions you need to make concerning how well each rep is closing sales. It also allows you to rank your reps. For example, if you have a choice of giving a lead to two reps, and one has a net sale of $3,700 per lead and the other $4,400, you can see the value to your business in giving the lead to the one with the higher net sale per lead. Meaning a rep’s slugging average will determine the number of opportunities they get. But this also gives you an opportunity to work with the reps who need to raise their slugging average. This means you can have more reps with higher averages, which creates more sales for your business. By analyzing the data and using that to coach your reps, you can see higher rates of sales with more profit, which will bring your cost per acquisition down. When the team slugging average goes up, everyone is happy, including the customers. 

By looking at those with high slugging averages and seeing how long they spend on each portion of the presentation, you can get a good idea of what everyone else should be doing to raise their average. Then you can train them and get their averages up. 

Get easy to read analytics with Ingage 

Sales analytics is all about tracking the right KPIs for your business that will help you lower costs, increase sales and improve your ROI. By knowing what to track, what to look at and how to interpret the data, you can build a better and more successful sales team. Trying to track sales analytics without the proper software is like running in the dark. With Ingage, our software helps you easily read your analytics. We provide in-depth information about your reps, your customers and their behaviors. Schedule a demo with one of our sales experts today! 

Original article source: Ingage