Distributors, wholesalers, and manufacturers rely on numbers to run their businesses. From receivable accounts to inventory counts, data collection and analysis is both crucial and tedious. Even if sales are streaming in, do you understand the impact that sales performance has on your business? If not, sales metrics can clue you in on what is working and what isn’t—and how you can navigate these obstacles to sustainably grow your business.
Why’s that, you might say, isn’t that something I’m already capturing? Or even, Oh great, another metric to keep track of. We hear you. But there’s just no way around it. If you’re not measuring sales performance, you almost definitely selling yourself short.
Sales metrics that lack a clear sales strategy could leave your sales team floundering. They can’t know how impactful their efforts are or even where to direct them. If you don’t have actionable and easy-to-understand metrics, you are wasting time, resources, and worst of all, money.
What automated sales metrics show you
Measuring sales activity uncovers valuable data that you can use to forecast sales and align targets with business goals. Tracking sales performance encourages team members to work effectively and efficiently—leading to healthy sales performance. This, in turn, positively impacts your business model and profit margins by freeing your sales team to actually sell.
Revenue
Speaking of revenue, let’s talk about revenue attribution. When combined with the appropriate sales and marketing strategies, you can estimate projected revenue and channel attribution with sales metrics.
Use data-backed evidence to prioritize bigger deals and beat indecisiveness. Furthermore, you get to learn more about your own company while unearthing valuable marketing information. These numerical gems equip your sales team with the knowledge and motivation needed to effectively and efficiently close more deals.
Conversion rates
Business-aligned conversion rates that consistently meet or exceed sales metrics or quotas directly impact revenue. If you want to determine the effectiveness of your marketing efforts, this sales metric is paramount. It can also provide key insights and help you measure the success of your business.
Do you want to see how many leads are actually being converted into buyers and subscribers? Conversion rates can help with that. How can you best guide your current audience through the sales pipeline? Use conversion rates to learn the number of site views, visitors, posts, and emails it took you to get those conversions.
Still not sold? Consider this multi-faceted approach. Your company is starting a new product launch. Typically, you’d use a combination of email marketing, social media, and cold-calling. But this time, you want to refine your strategy to be more economical. Blind guessing is a surefire way to burn through a budget. So, how can you know which tools to deploy to achieve maximum ROI?
All you have to do is crunch the numbers using your own past sales. Let’s say you rely on emails, cold calls, and social media posts to launch your products. Simply divide the number of conversions, or purchases, you gain from each channel by the number of emails, calls, and social media posts you make. This formula teaches you which of those contact points best serves you.
Granted, there’s no point in trying to address conversion rates though without knowing what’s affecting them. This leads us to the next costly blunder—sales funnel leakage.
Sales funnel leakage
Pinpointing leaks in your sales funnel helps you gain detailed findings about your sales metrics.
A glaring symptom of a leaky sales funnel is a disproportionate ratio of lost prospects. Of course, it’s to be expected that some prospects will drop off in sales. That’s business. But, if that number is higher than usual with no causal external factors present, it likely signals an internal problem.
To minimize these drops, gain perspective with visuals. Use data as evidence to analyze your funnels in a funnel report. This offers a visual representation of how prospective customers or clients are moving through your sales pipeline. By seeing where things take a turn—or a drop—you can course correct to steer consumer behaviour.
This simple monitoring and maintenance is gold for ensuring sales metrics are meaningful and aligned with your business strategy.
Sales rep performance
Your sales representatives are pivotal when it comes to both repairing a leaky funnel and maintaining sales metrics in general. How are your sales reps performing? If they’re consistently not hitting their targets, you’ve got some digging to do.
Use sales metrics to measure if reps are meeting their quotas. They can also be used to determine if quotas are too low, too high, too strict, or outdated.
Combining historical data and sales metrics tells the story of a sales rep’s performance. Your representatives’ performance metrics can help you identify who’s excelling and who may benefit from further aid. With this knowledge, you can arm your team with the skills they need to succeed.
In the same breath, be sure not to take these numbers at face value; they aren’t the sole evidence of your team’s efforts. Be curious and ask questions to understand their perspective and unique sales process. Use data-backed sales metrics in combination with genuine concern and desire to uplift. This will help your team feel appreciated and empowered to get back on track.
The sales rep app that gives you clarity: Skynamo
It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B distributor, wholesaler, or manufacturer—your sales team is directly linked to your business success. This is why it is so important to empower them to do great work by regularly analyzing your sales performance metrics.
Clarity is key, and using sales metrics can help you gain a clear understanding of what’s happening in your business. These metrics can give you clues as to what’s working and what’s not. Trimming inefficient or outdated fat is key to growth and profit.
Maximize the impact of this data by making it visual in the field sales or mobile sales app. Work with your team to make improvements to your sales process and strategies. Combine data-backed sales metrics and teamwork to achieve better results and grow your profits.
Are you interested in knowing how refined sales metrics can work for your business? Have a chat with our dedicated team to learn what this invaluable data can do for you and yours today.
