ARCLYTICZ PVT. LTD.

SALES ANALYTICS

WHAT IS SALES ANALYTICS

Sales analytics comprises the analysis technologies and processes that measure, manage, and
analyze sales data. With sales analytics, your business can have a deeper understanding of the
sales data you collect and what that data means. These insights can help sales teams
understand and make more effective decisions about prospects and customers, product lines,
market opportunities, and sales team performance.

BENEFITS OF SALES ANALYTICS

Sales analytics tools allow organizations to leverage their data to provide clear insight into
sales pipelines, products, and staff performance. With these insights, you are better equipped
to understand and manage risk, as well as deliver more accurate sales forecasts. By making
data accessible and understandable, sales analytics make it easier for sales reps, managers,
and leadership to prioritize the right sales activities at the right time, driving efficiency,
revenue, and growth.

It also identifies areas of growth and increase efficiency and productivity.

HOW TO RUN A SALES DATA ANALYSIS

1. Select what you want to analyse

2. Identify and layout specific, measurable objectives -
3. Determine how frequently you want to analyse the sales data
4. Compile the sales data manually or use sales analytics software on a rolling basis
5. Leverage data visualization tools
6. Analyse the data and look for trends
7. Apply your results to inform better sales efforts.

TOOLS USED FOR SALES ANALYTICS

HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Sales Hub contains a robust suite of sales analytics resources to create and maintain
virtually any kind of data report. The software has the necessary tools to help you track deal
forecasts, sales performance reports, and productivity logs — among several other key
metrics and analyses.

PowerBI

Power BI is a sales analytics software and data visualization resource from Microsoft. It's a
comprehensive analytics solution that scales from individual salespeople to your company as
a whole — affording your entire organization access to an appropriate degree of sales
analytics data to inform smarter, more effective sales efforts from top to bottom.

MaxG

MaxG is a product in a class of its own. It's the world's first B2B sales and recommendation
engine. The platform offers intelligent performance insight about and straightforward
visibility into your marketing efforts — including content like blogs and CTAs.

What really makes MaxG unique comes from what it manages to do with that information.
Via the power of AI, the platform can translate those general insights into
actionable suggestions on how to improve your sales and marketing efforts. MaxG also
contains an industry benchmarking feature that lets you compare your data to your
competition.

Zoho Analytics

Zoho Analytics is a self-service BI and data analytics software with extensive integrative
capabilities and particularly versatile and attractive data visualization resources. The platform
allows you to channel massive volumes of raw data into actionable, straightforward reports
— all carefully organized on a sleek interface.

The platform is particularly notable for its ability to blend huge amounts of data from a wide
array of sources. If you have data stored in multiple sources — like HubSpot, Excel, and
Google Cloud Storage — Zoho Analytics allows you to easily combine them and translate
that breadth of information into cross-functional reports and dashboards.

Zoho analytics offer

 1. Win-loss analysis
Identify win-loss opportunities in your sales pipeline. Forecast sales, plan for future
growth by tracking the win-loss rate, and empower your sales team win more.

2. Sales rep analysis

Measure and analyze your sales representatives' performance, identify your best and
least performing sales reps of your organization and improve your team's sales.

3. Data blending
Combine data from different sources and create cross functional reports. For example,
combine Sales data along with helpdesk data to create an activities/lead report.

Clari

Using AI and data science, Clari provides insights on prospects’ readiness to buy, giving your
team a smart window and an ample legroom to make precise assessments and take decisive
action in the opportunity-to-close stage in your sales cycle. Use Clari to formulate accurate
forecasts and identify specific areas your sellers should focus on to improve skills, perfect
pitches, and win deals.

WHAT ARE THE KEY REASONS TO BUILD A SALES LEADERBOARD?

 Track individual sales performance in real-time
 Track team sales performance in real-time
 Directly compare performance across multiple sales metrics or KPIs
 Use friendly competition to fuel motivation in the sales team
 Create a transparent, data-driven work environment
 Make quick decisions based on the data instead of waiting for end of quarter reports

WHAT ARE THE CHALLENGES OF SALES ANALYTICS?

1. Ensuring that data is accurate and timely.

2. Fielding data from prospective customers.
3. Determining which historical data is relevant to include in your sales analysis.
4. Integrating, cleansing, preparing data from different sources or applications.
 TYPES OF SALES ANALYTICS

 Descriptive: Summarized, prioritized observations from sales related data. Example:

spike in sales of a certain product in professional services industry in a certain region.
 Diagnostic: Possible explanations for observations from sales related data. Example:
Customers in automotive industry are spending less time to call a sales rep. Increased
competition in the industry could be pushing companies to invest in our product.
 Predictive: Based on diagnostic results, predictions are made. Example: Leads from
professional services industry in a certain region get higher scores. As a result, sales
reps spend more time on those leads
 Prescriptive: Predictive analytics results are explained and sales rep is provided with
a clear game plan. Example: Sales reps get tactics before calls to underline certain
aspects of the product that are important to the customer.

LIMITATIONS OF SALES ANALYTICS

Sales analytics makes sense for large organizations with at least

 ten sales reps

 tens of sales
 a stable product and target market so the target customer behavior does not change
dramatically every day

Additionally, some sales analytics suffers from the limitations of modern AI systems such

as not providing explanations for the outputs they provide.

BEST PRACTICES FOR BETTER SALES ANALYTICS

1. Take your sales analytics initiative one step at a time

Sales analytics tools can help you track and understand the behaviour of your sales force and
also give you insights into why customers buy what they buy.

 Descriptive – What happened? For example, which key opportunities did we win or
lose?
 Diagnostic – Why did it happen? For instance, we won or lost due to competitive
pricing.
  Predictive – What will happen? For example, win rates are likely to improve next
quarter.
 Prescriptive – How can we make it happen? For instance, we will improve win rates
due to more effective value selling.

This means that it is usual to start the project at the descriptive and diagnostic levels and,
once experience has been gained, to move onto the next stage.

2. Ensure your data is complete and accurate

Any sales analytics tool will only be as effective as the data entered into it from sales force
automation and/or enterprise resource planning systems. But many companies tend to employ
such tools in a rather undisciplined way, failing to provide sales staff with simple, structured
templates laying out the data they want to collect.

It is also worth focusing time and effort on ensuring that the quality of your data is high by
undertaking a data cleansing project on existing information and making certain that it as
complete and accurate as possible. Failure to do so could mean that answers to your questions
are not reliable.

3. Understand what outputs will help you attain your objectives

All too many organisations go out and buy an expensive sales analytics tool and then sit back
and wait for the magic to happen. But in order to make the most of it, it is very important to
have a clear view of what you are trying to achieve – so what are you using the tool for and to
what end.

To help things along here, consider which part of your sales process needs attention, either
because it is poorly-understood or broken. Then, come up with very specific questions about
that area in order to gain a clearer idea of what is going on. Such questions could include how
long it takes on average to close a deal and which customers buy what products where.

4. Ensure you have sales operations expertise in place

If a given sales manager does not have sales operations expertise, it may be helpful to bring
such skills in. Sales operations personnel are logistical, process-oriented people who provide
discipline and structure when working with sales analytics tools. Many are data scientists, or
are in the process of becoming one, and undertake activities such as preparing reports,
evaluating sales enablement tools and setting up systems.

5. Handle change management carefully

In order to get hold of the right data for analysis purposes, it is crucial to ensure that sales
staff keep their records updated with pre-defined information such as potential opportunities
at each stage of the sales cycle.

To encourage them to do so, make it clear that the organisation now relies on such
information, which means that it is considered a core responsibility to accurately record their
activities in order to ensure that the team, and the company itself, performs better as a whole.

6. Keep things simple and iterative

Large corporate sales analytics projects that are led by IT departments often fail because they
can become over-scoped and over-specified and just too complex. The problem is that,
rolling out functionality based on everyone’s pet features all at once can result in the
initiative simply collapsing under its own weight.

But keeping things simple and limiting the initial scope of initiatives generally works well.
The old adage ‘deploy early and deploy often’ applies here, with each stage of the process
comprising activities that are linked to key deliverables, which are made available at the end
of each phase.

This means that new features are rolled out iteratively in chunks on a must-have basis, which
in turn enables you to understand what has been used and what works. Managing this process
is likely to require an experienced project manager or subject matter expert in order to keep
nice-to-haves to a minimum, however.

7. Remember it is the data that will give you sales insights, not the tool per se

Your sales analytics tool will show you patterns in data and answer your specific questions,
but it will not be able to interpret this information for you – that is down to you. But it is in
interpreting and acting on the data provided that the real power lies as it will help to inform
your sales strategy.