Analytics Can Drive Spot Sales Improvement

Analytics used to be for historical purposes, answering the question “How did we do?” But given the power of today’s sales intelligence tools, a shift has occurred. When used properly, such analytics enable users to make smarter and more accurate business decisions. It also provides the insight necessary to steer a business forward, especially when it comes to TV spot sales.

These days, analytics are available from many sources — your sales proposal system, your CRM system, your traffic systems, among them. This is great from the perspective of having measurable data at your fingertips, but it can turn into a nightmare if you get caught up manually trying to aggregate the data from multiple systems and stations.

This is where you need to take a step back and look at your operational workflow from the highest possible level. Sales Intelligence tools are now able to sit on top of the workflow for an entire enterprise. These tools pull the data up through the varying systems, normalizing and aggregating it along the way to produce relevant analytics. Numerous analytics are available with the powerful sales Intelligence tools (see infograph).

After looking at a summarized analysis of how your business is doing at the highest level, interactive dashboards allow you to drill down instantly to see how specific stations, categories, platforms or account executives are doing. So what analytics are relevant to your sales business and which ones help you to identify opportunities? Here are three key analytics that give you the advantage to sell more.

Sales Coverage Analysis

Have you ever asked the question “How can I easily tell where my accounts/agencies are spending … and where are they not spending?”  Sales intelligence tools have been designed to answer just that. They show you the spread of each account or agency for the timeframe selected. At the same time, you can view which accounts or agencies aren’t spending on a particular outlet, but are spending elsewhere. This analysis in itself presents a targeted upsell opportunity.  

Sales Retention Analysis

It’s the age-old sales question: “How much of my business generated in the past is still with us after one year? Two years? Three years?”  Sales intelligence tools let you analyze year-over-year sales by outlet, office and account executive’s retention over time. By analyzing this data, you are able to see new business and returning business retained, while also uncovering where business has not been retained. This directly and immediately provides you with a targeted sales account focus.

New Business Analysis

Just as much as it is important to analyze what business is being retained, it is just as important to analyze what business is new business. Is new business sales revenue on par?

A new business analysis lets you see how much new new business is being generated per account executive, office and outlet and compare it to your returning business. You can and should compare them to each other in order to give you greater insight into the strength of each of your new business means.

The power of sales intelligence tools provides the analytics you need to operate more efficiently, effectively and accurately and, at the end of the day, creates opportunities to sell more.

DJ Cavanaugh is CEO of Matrix Solutions, a CRM and sales intelligence software provider. You can reach him at [email protected].