6 Ways To Create Data-driven Sales Strategies with The Right Sales Analytics
Data-driven companies are 23 times more likely to convert leads and 6 times more likely to retain customers. This whopping statistic highlights the impact of analytics and data on the sales made by a company.
More and more businesses are recognizing the power of data analytics and incorporating it into their sales operations for long-term success. Being a vast field, it can feel overwhelming when you’re considering where to begin utilizing analytics.
We created a handy guide that helps you understand the most actionable ways to leverage analytics to improve your sales.
Shortcuts:
- Assist the customers at all times
- Conduct thorough market research
- Identify lapses in your practices
- Optimize workflows
- Identify high-performing sales professionals
- Study customer behavior to posit more-suited offers
1. Assist the customers at all times
Research by the Baymard Institute shows that the average eCommerce cart abandonment rate is 69.82%. More than half of your customers never end up completing the purchase. This puts a severe dent in your sales performance.
It also reveals a crucial pattern: customers like what they see on your website, enough to make a purchase. Your marketing efforts are bringing customers to your website and the website is pushing leads down the funnel. But they don’t end up completing the purchase.
The reason for this is that your website does not assist them in completing the transaction making them leave. Implementing a chatbot for your site is an excellent way to combat this issue while enhancing the functionality of your website.
A chatbot holds the user’s hand all through their experience with you. It greets them as soon as they enter your website and interacts with them while they browse it, providing them with useful links to get them to their desired destination.
Here’s how a chatbot engages with the user in different ways:
- They hold the user’s hand through making a purchase and resolving any issue they may face while placing the order or making the payment.
- If they cannot find something, they can ask the chatbot for assistance. It will lead them to the very page they’re looking for.
- It can ask them for their feedback on the website after they’ve spent a few minutes with you.
- It can inform them of the offers that you may be running to interest them in a purchase.
This directly boosts your sales as it ensures that the user completes the transactions without abandoning them. It also gives the user a positive experience with your brand, making it more likely that they revisit you in the future.
2. Conduct thorough market research
A staggering 87% of marketers say that data is the most underutilized resource in business operations today. Despite the buzz around data analytics and its impact on improving performance, this statistic shows a rather contrasting reality when it comes to leveraging data in business.
Despite wanting to make the most of data, companies are struggling to incorporate it into their day-to-day operations in ways that optimize their processes while yielding better results. If you’re struggling to incorporate data to improve your sales performance, begin with market research.
Market research is the precursor to your marketing and sales efforts. Even if you’re not sure about how to incorporate data analytics into your marketing and sales campaigns, you can start with market research to ease your way into the operations.
This helps you understand analytics while you strengthen the base of your sales efforts. You’ll be able to make more data-driven and informed decisions based on the formidable data you collect through market research.
The four most common techniques used in data analytics for market research are:
- Descriptive analytics — A straightforward collection of events that happened over a given period of time. For example, the likes and dislikes of your target audience.
- Diagnostic analytics — This analysis focuses more on why something happened. For example, why a certain product from your competitor was well-received by your target audience.
- Predictive analytics — Predicts what is going to happen in the near future based on historical data. For example, how a campaign will be received by an audience.
- Prescriptive analytics — Focuses on creating the most optimized path for a campaign that will yield the best results. For example, a curated social media campaign to reengage customers who haven’t interacted with you for over six months.
3. Identify lapses in your practices
Another way to leverage data analytics when you’re not certain where to begin is to review your existing marketing efforts and campaigns. Identify both lapses as well as the strong points in your practices to improve on them.
You most likely already conduct reviews of your ongoing practices from time to time. However, by having data backing you up, you’re able to make informed decisions regarding your sales efforts.
Once you find areas to improve upon, brainstorm with your team to find ways to incorporate data into your existing processes to boost them. Your goal should be to understand what is working and what is not based on the data you collect about your processes.
Here are some tips to help you identify the weak and strong points in your existing sales efforts with the help of data analytics:
Use data to analyze your existing sales efforts:
- Set realistic KPIs to ensure that everything that is being examined is given a fair chance.
- Try to have as broad a dataset as you can to make sure that your diagnosis is more accurate.
- Make reviews a continuous process but remember to give everything a fair amount of time before judging its efficiency.
- Once you identify a lapse or opportunity in your practices, brainstorm to come up with the best possible solutions for it (change or remove).
4. Optimize workflows
One of the most potent uses of data analytics when it comes to improving sales performance is optimizing your sales workflows to achieve the most efficient result. We talked before about companies not being able to incorporate data into their operations.
Using it in precursors to sales campaigns such as market research and in reviewing existing processes to find lapses are great ways to ease the analytics into the sales processes.
Once you have a solid foundation for your campaigns and recognize the various ways your existing processes can improve, you’ll easily be able to incorporate data into the processes as you’re now armed with the information of where it will suit you best.
If your sales team is struggling to keep track of the conversations with clients, you can provide them with platforms, tools, and resources to organize those conversations.
Data analytics tools will help them identify conversation patterns with clients as well as predict their responses to the offers they make to them.
They can use this information to maneuver conversation with them more adeptly and derive more conversions and sales out of them. This helps you optimize your workflows to their fullest potential and achieve better results.
A platform for customer journey analytics
Having a robust platform for customer journey analytics is paramount in the rapidly evolving landscape of data-driven sales.
A comprehensive analytics platform allows you to track and analyze customer interactions at every touchpoint, offering valuable insights into their preferences, behaviors, and pain points.
By leveraging a sophisticated analytics platform, businesses can tailor their sales strategies to align with the customer’s journey, ensuring a personalized and seamless experience. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also contributes to increased conversion rates and long-term customer loyalty.
Investing in a reliable customer journey analytics platform becomes a strategic imperative for businesses aiming to stay ahead in the competitive market. The ability to derive actionable insights from customer data empowers sales teams to make informed decisions, ultimately driving success in the data-driven sales era.
5. Identify high-performing sales professionals
Data analytics is not just to be used in sales campaigns and processes.
Analytics should also be utilized in managing your sales team. Collect relevant data about the performance of your team to identify the high-performing sales representatives, as well as the overall performance of your team.
This helps you get a good understanding of how your sales team interacts with clients. You can identify high-performing individuals and reward them. Doing so tremendously boosts morale.
Outperforming team members will be motivated to perform better. The other members of the team will be motivated to also put their best foot forward with their tasks, promoting healthy competition in your sales team.
6. Study customer behavior to posit more-suited offers
Studying existing customer behavior can help you identify patterns in the way they interact with you or the way they navigate their own customer journey.
You can use this information to:
- Personalize your interactions with them,
- Posit them offers that are more suited to where they are in their customer journey, and
- Predict their responses to the offers you make and maneuver the conversation accordingly.
An example of this is the makeup and beauty brand Glossier which registered a growth of 600% in just one year when they started using data analysis. They specifically focused their efforts on deriving insights into their customer base.
It helped them understand the key points in their customer’s life cycle and map out a journey map for them. They related these statistics to other key KPIs such as retention and churn to better gauge the customer’s lifetime value.
Optimize workflows and provide positive experiences to customers to boost sales through data
Big Data and Data Analytics have taken the world by storm by providing actionable ways to boost performance and increase productivity in every realm of your business.
To use data to boost sales, you need to focus on providing complete assistance to your customers whenever they visit your website. Deploy chatbots to engage customers right away and ensure that they have a positive experience with you.
Use data in every phase of sales operations, be it market research, optimizing existing operations, or studying customer behavior to engage with them better.