What are the top benefits of sales analytics? Well, there are really two ways to answer that question: By looking at how sales analytics optimize decision-making processes for employees in the workplace and by looking at business benefits that analytics can bolster.
Here’s more insight into both these types of benefits.
Sales Analytics Benefits to Data-Driven Decisions
The right sales analytics solution can revolutionize the very way in which employees on the sales team and within the larger business ecosystem are even able to make decisions in general. Regardless of the specific decision being made, self-service analytics platforms aim to make data insights more accessible, faster to access, easier to share and more interactive across the board.
Here are some of the top ways sales analytics can drive more advantageous decisions driven by data on the technical side.
Bring Together Disparate Data Sources
One ongoing challenge in today’s complex sales landscape is bridging the gaps between many different sources of data, both internal and external. Legacy systems often stored different sources of data separately, meaning generating a report containing data from multiple sources would require navigating often cumbersome silos — which often slowed down the process. When different sources of data are allowed to coexist separately, it also increases the chances of discrepancies in truth and accuracy.
Sales analytics featuring full-stack architecture create a single version of truth and can pull data from multiple relevant sources as needed, like CRM, social media, marketing analytics, ecommerce websites, warehouse records and many more.
Allow for Additional Drill-Down
Traditional reports were typically “what you see is what you get” in nature. If you wanted to dive deeper, you’d probably have to request a subsequent report — and who knows how long that could take.
Self-service analytics produces interactive graphs and charts rather than static reports, meaning users can keep clicking through to find out more information about the insight, including the important context they need to fully understand the situation upon which they’re going to act.
Sales Analytics Benefits to Business Outcomes
We’ve covered how a more advanced approach to sales analytics benefits users on the ground, helping them get the insights they need to power data-driven decision-making. So, how can sales analytics drive optimal business outcomes through those decisions? After all, leaders usually want to know how they can expect to see a measurable return on investment before they agree to invest in analytics upgrades.
Understanding Supply Chain Factors
The COVID-19 pandemic reminded us how interconnected everything is in the world of sales: manufacturing, transportation, storage, marketing, order fulfillment and consumer behavior. There’s a lot more going on under the surface than the average consumer would probably guess — and these factors affect pricing, availability and much more.
Part of sales analytics is giving decision-makers granular insights into every step of the supply chain, which in turn can help them anticipate demand and allocate resources to best serve the company.
Maximize Customer Retention Rates
Gaining a deep understanding of who your best customers are, what they want and how they act online and in real life is the only way to retain customer relationships beyond the first transaction — something that has been shown time and time again to achieve better value than prioritizing customer acquisition.
Data analytics can shed light on trends in customer churn so sales teams can proactively mitigate these lost opportunities. Furthermore, analytics can reveal which loyalty efforts resonate most with customers in terms of driving spending, engagement and referrals.
Advanced sales analytics aim to bring together huge amounts of data across different sources into one seamless — and interactive — interface that employees can use to fuel more profitable decisions.
