Knowing what works and what doesn’t is the essence of sales analytics. In today’s world being able to pinpoint costs, and what services or items sell and which flounder, is what keeps a company from failing. Everyone from the CEO to the worker behind the desk needs this information to keep a business running. This is particularly the case with trends coming and going at light speed. By altering your service to meet new trends, you will alleviate the risk of being left behind.
If you find this daunting and a bit overwhelming, you aren’t alone. This is what makes sales analytic software so useful. They simplify the process and make it less stressful with their sales analytic software. Now instead of shifting through tons of paperwork trying to analyze trends, sales analytic software compiles it all together and helps remove all the excess information that you don’t need.
As you make sales and put out an advertisement, you will notice trends in sales based on the consumer’s response to your ads. This means you will find certain groups respond to different ads differently. You might theorize that younger generations are more likely to act upon ads on the Internet, while older generations may react to ads on billboards. However, without sales analytics, you will never know.
There are several ways to track results and determine what is working. If you place a television ad, for instance, you might offer a customer 5% off if they use a specific code when they call your number. Your sales team then might receive 25 calls by customers using the unique code, allowing you to know everyone that used the code watched the ad. Now assume you did another television ad and received only 15 callers using a different code, by keeping track of the callers and which code they respond to, you can determine that the first ad was more effective than the second.
Another strategy is placing online ads through companies like Facebook to increase traffic to your web page or advertise a product. This theory is similar to the previous but tracked differently. In this case, every time someone clicks on the ad it takes them to your web page, with which you can usually track the traffic to your website and how they got there with various plugins or software.
This is where sales analytic software comes in handy. Before sale analytic software was created, you either had to keep track of results on paper or an excel spreadsheet. This process was time consuming and hard to sort through. With analytic software, you can easily track your web page hits and count the responses to TV ads to see what gives you the best results. Even better, the software breaks it down into categories and allows you to see where your money is going and how much you are getting back on your investments.