A step-by-step guide to analyzing your sales data
So you’re looking to analyze your sales data… that’s exciting!
This guide can help you in that journey, so you’re sure you’re ticking all the essential boxes and you’re delivering a top notch sales analysis. Hopefully, with a big revenue boost on the horizon. 📈
We will go through the following aspects:
- What a sales analysis is
- What benefits you can expect
- What different types of sales analysis there are
- How to go about a sales analysis
- Different tools you can use
Let’s dig in! 👇
What is sales analysis?
Sales analysis is your business's health check-up. It's about diving into your sales data to see how you're doing, spotting trends, and figuring out how to improve.
Think of it as a treasure hunt where the treasures are valuable insights that can help you boost your sales game… and literally make you more money as well. 🤑
You get to see what's working, what's not, and where you have room to grow.
How often should you analyze your sales?
How often should you peek into your sales treasure chest? 👀 Well, it depends.
A good rule of thumb is to do a quick check every month, a deeper dive every quarter, and a full-on treasure hunt at the end of the year.
Monthly check-ups help you stay on top of things, quarterly reviews let you spot trends, and annual analyses give you the big picture.
What metrics should you analyze?
To get the full scoop, keep an eye on these key metrics:
- Sales Revenue: How much money you're bringing in.
- Sales Growth: How much your sales are increasing over time.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of leads that become customers. It’s also interesting to analyze this on a stage-by-stage basis.
- Average Deal Value: The average value of each sale.
- Sales Cycle Length: How long it takes to close a sale.
- Amount of New Deals: How well you keep filling up your sales pipeline.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): How much it costs to get a new customer.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): The total revenue you can expect from a customer over their lifetime.
- Top Lost Reasons: Why you most often lose out on deals.
- Top Lead Sources: Where most of your potential customers come from.
- Activity per Rep: How many emails, calls, meetings, … every rep is having with their leads.
Tracking these sales metrics (or even sales goals) will enable you to steer your business in the right directions. 🛥️
Sales analysis benefits
Good sales analysis on a regular basis can have an enormous impact on your business.
Most often, there are opportunities for improvement that you’re not seeing while you’re in the weeds, but if you take a step back and analyze your sales data they’ll all of a sudden appear.
Optimize your sales funnel
Analyzing your sales funnel helps you find and fix any clogs. You'll see where prospects drop off and how to keep them moving smoothly through the sales pipeline, making it easier to turn leads into happy customers.
This can be very powerful: one of our customers reported 2.6x more revenue after fixing a small clog in their funnel. 💪
Improve your sales performance
Regularly checking your sales data lets you see what's hot and what's not. This means you can tweak your strategies, focus on what's working, and give your sales performance a serious boost.
You could for instance look at which reps are doing well to learn from them, see which lead sources are performing well so you can spend more on them, etc.
Forecast more accurately
Want to see the future? 🔮 Sales analysis can help with that. By looking at past data and current trends, sales managers can make more accurate sales forecasts.
This helps with planning, budgeting, and setting realistic goals. Your company’s CFO will be extremely grateful for it.
Identify growth opportunities
A sales analysis report is like having a map to hidden treasures. It shows you new sales trends, customer preferences, and any friction in the sales process that you can remove.
Doing a regular sales analysis and taking actions based on those is the easiest way to grow your business.
Increase your revenue
Again, at the end of the day, sales analysis is all about bringing in more cash. 💰
By refining your strategies based on actionable, data-driven insights, you can boost your sales and keep that revenue on the rise.
Types of sales analysis
There are many types of data you can collect about your sales and several ways you can analyze your sales. Here are some of the most common types of sales analysis.
Sales funnel/pipeline analysis
This type of analysis looks at your sales funnel or pipeline. It helps you understand how leads move through the stages, where they get stuck, and how you can make the process smoother to improve conversions.
Here’s an example of a funnel analysis in Salesflare.
It shows you where opportunities tend to get stuck and drop out of the funnel.
The next step: see why that happens and fix it!
Sales team performance analysis
Here, you're focusing on how well your sales team is doing. You'll see who's crushing their targets, who's struggling, and what tactics are working best. This helps you support your team and replicate success.
Often, the top performers can be used as a leading example for the other sales reps. 🏅
Sales forecast and trend analysis
This involves predicting future sales based on past data and current trends. It's like having a crystal ball for your business, helping you plan and set realistic goals.
Without good sales forecasting, it’s often hard to maintain a good cash planning for your business. 🏦
If you’re interested in digging deeper, you can explore our guide on sales forecasting.
Product sales analysis
Product sales analysis looks at how individual products or services are performing. You'll see which ones are flying off the shelves and which ones are gathering dust, helping you make smart product decisions.
Sales SWOT and GAP analysis
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) and GAP analysis give you a deep dive into your sales environment. You'll see where you're strong, where you can improve, and how to tackle challenges head-on.
This kind of analysis is not something you’ll typically find in sales analysis tools, but it can be a perfect way to complement your analysis.
How to do sales analysis
Here’s how you can go about a sales analysis step by step.
1. Collect your sales data
Step one: gather all your historical sales data. This means pulling info from your CRM, sales reports, transaction records, and any other sources. The more hard sales data, the better the insights.
This is usually the most difficult step, because:
- Your sales team is probably not tracking everything 100% in the CRM
- Different people may be tracking things in different ways
- The CRM may not exactly make it easy to collect the data
Garbage in, garbage out, as they say! 🚯
That’s why it’s of great importance to use a CRM tool that your sales team actually uses and makes it as easy as possible to track all customer data. (This is actually the reason why we started Salesflare.)
2. Build sales analysis dashboards and reports
Next, turn that data into easy-to-read dashboards and reports.
Use charts, graphs, and tables to visualize the data. This makes it easier to spot trends and understand what's happening at a glance. 📊
Most CRM systems come with built-in reporting capabilities and we recommend using those, as these have access to the widest range of data and usually update live. Different reporting capabilities may come on different pricing plans.
Our CRM, Salesflare, comes preloaded with the most common reports, available on the Growth plan. On the Pro plan you can build any custom report you like.
Check out our dedicated guide for some example dashboards and reports.
3. Analyze the sales data
Finally, dive into the data.
Look for patterns, compare your overall business performance against targets, and figure out what's driving any deviations. Use these insights to make smart decisions and improve your sales strategy.
Don’t just focus on the numbers… look for stories in the data. What do the trends tell you about your customers and inefficiencies in your overall sales process? 🤔
4. Improve your sales… and analyze the results
Now that you know what’s going well in your sales and what can be improved… you can use it!
Here’s a step-by-step plan:
- Make a list of your potential improvements
- Prioritize them by return on investment (i.e. divide the potential business impact by the required effort)
- Define solutions for each
- Implement the solutions
- Keep measuring and analyzing the results
If you want some inspiration to get you going, here’s a story of some Salesflare heroes who are killing it by doing exactly that on a consistent basis. 🦸
Tools for sales analysis
Now what can you use in terms of tools to make your sales analysis a breeze?
Sales analysis software
The best tool to analyze your sales data is probably the system that contains your sales: your CRM.
Not only does it have access to the widest range of sales data, it’s probably also the most convenient way to analyze your data, without requiring you to do any heavy lifting.
If you’re not using any sales CRM yet, have a look at Salesflare. ✨
You won’t find a CRM that makes it easier to track all your sales data. And having good sales data is the major bottleneck when trying to analyze your sales.
Salesflare comes with built-in dashboards and reports that cover common needs, so you can jump in straight away. And if you want to build custom reports, that’s possible too.
You can learn more about Salesflare (like its integration with Gmail/Outlook and with LinkedIn, how it makes tracking sales easier, …) on the Salesflare homepage. 👈
Free Excel (or Google Sheets) template
If you're just starting out or on a tight budget, a free Excel or Google Sheets template can be a temporary lifesaver. These templates provide a simple way to input and analyze your sales data, helping you get a few valuable insights without spending a dime.
You can check out our popular free sales report template. 🆓 It’ll get you going!
Ready to start analyzing your sales? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you still have questions. You can get in touch with the team via the chat on our website. 💬
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