5 Rules for Better Sales Analytics

Sales performance isn’t just about sales numbers and sales activities.  Sure, trends in sales success are deeply tied to sales information, but many other actions support the impact of your sales team: from prospect behavior in the marketing funnel to sales development performance to the processes applied in the company’s financial and customer support practices.

Sales performance isn’t just about sales numbers and sales activities.  Sure, trends in sales success are deeply tied to sales information, but many other actions support the impact of your sales team: from prospect behavior in the marketing funnel to sales development performance to the processes applied in the company’s financial and customer support practices.

Your sales team might like to think they’re the most self-sufficient kids on the proverbial block, but the reality is that their performance metrics are linked to everything from marketing activity to finance and support follow-through. 

This is why myopic sales metrics can be dangerous—if the only performance data you’re looking at is data generated though your sales team activities – you might be missing the bigger picture. 

Combine Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Support Data, Easily

You need sales performance data, you need it now, and you don’t have time to learn Python scripting or SQL query language. 

 Typical Customer Relationship Management (CRM) packages like Salesforce.com store data about leads and opportunities.  Using build-in reporting capabilities in Salesforce.com, you’ll be able to understand how many contact attempts your sales representative made, how long it took them to turn a promising lead into a contact, and a host of other data about your leads and their organizations.  That’s a lot of information, but it’s not the only relevant information.  

Could you answer the following without having to call IT?

• Which content is most likely to bring in leads that turn into business? 
• Is there any correlation between Google keywords and higher win rates? 
• What support practices allow you to maximize customer value?
• Which customers make the best opportunity based on past orders?

If you are able to answer each of the above, you are in the top percentiles of marketing and sales organizations.  The vast majority of companies though find it difficult to gain full visibility, despite the fact that the answers to these questions could mean massively positive changes to business strategy. 

Bottom line: Rather than try to charm a member of your engineering or IT team into helping you create a one-time report, consider a solution that lets you combine and merge data from a variety of sources and formats.  If your organization is like most, you might find yourself working with data from Google Analytics (Advertising/Marketing), Salesforce.com (Sales), Intuit Quickbooks (Finance), Zendesk (Support), and other conventional data sources such as Microsoft Excel, Access or a structured databases like SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle. 

Download the full report to read the rest of this article, and visit SiSense.com to learn more about our custom dashboarding and data visualization software.