Sales and revenue are the engine of any profitable business – without them a business is simply not feasible. Tracking sales analytics will allow you to better predict and forecast sales, increasing the predictability of cash flows to prevent working capital issues. It also will allow you to better incentivize and understand your sales reps and improve accountability.

 

Data outside of POS or pipeline data, such as surveys are also used in order to find relationships and opportunities.[i] Leveraging this information allows for better understanding of customer segments, increasing the opportunity to retain and monetize these customers by using tools such as pricing analysis.

 

At the very minimum, sales driven organizations should be continuously assessing the following KPI’s and Metrics:[ii]

• Sales Growth

• Sales Target

• Opportunities

• Sales to Date

• Product Performance

• Lead Conversion Rate

• Sell-through rate

• Sales per rep

• Sales by region

• Pipeline size

• Deal value

• Deal age

• Win rate

 

Organizations should also be assessing:

• Pipeline Health Analytics (pipeline size, deal value, deal age, win rate): investigate the health of the leads of your sales pipeline. Maximize sales by ensuring your sales team has ample quantity and quality of sales opportunities

• Sales Stage Conversion Analytics (conversion rates from each stage of sales pipeline): Understand how deals flow through your organizations sales pipeline to ensure momentum is being maintained

• Sales Stage Activity Analytics (quantify activity levels across different tasks): Pinpoint the drivers of sales by understanding the sales and marketing activity within the pipeline. In doing so, organizations will be able to identify the core activities that have the largest effect on sales performance. 

 

Organizations looking to get ahead using sales analytics are turning to pricing analytics.[iii]

Pricing analytics is the process of analyzing the price sensitivity and price elasticity of specific market segments. This is especially useful in saturated, competitive markets where positioning is key. For successful implementation, the quality of data and the analytical tools used to develop the solution must be high. The business must be willing to test different pricing levels to examine the change in demand, which can be achieved through different promotions, incentives or loyalty programs.

 

A media and entertainment company first hand saw the benefit of optimizing their pricing strategy[iv]. Within the emergence of tech mediums, the media and entertainment industry has faced growing pains in monetizing their consumer base, as they are looking to new product lines and more niche customer segments.

 

To stay on top of the ever-changing technological landscape and consumer tastes, it was necessary for a leading media and entertainment firm to use pricing analytics to ensure they had an effective pricing strategy.

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By leveraging price optimization models, competitive management analysis, cost models, and customer elasticity models, the firm was able to implement a pricing strategy that allowed them to increase profitability, improve customer retention and lower cost of customer acquisition as well.

 

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[i] Sales Analytics. Techopedia. Retrieved from here

[ii]12 sales metrics to kick-start your sales analytics. Klipfolio. Retrieved from here

[iii]The 9 Best Marketing And Sales Analytics - Every Manager Should Know About. Forbes. Retrieved from here

[iv]Leveraging pricing analytics to improve profitability for a media and entertainment client. Quantzig. Retrieved from here and here