How data analytics can improve your sales

Data analytics is a powerful tool for sales professionals that helps identify inefficiencies and opportunities throughout the customer journey. Knowing your numbers enables you to optimize conversion rates at each stage of your sales process, from initial contact to closed deal.

• Map your customer journey and define clear stages from first contact to order
• Track conversion rates between stages (industry standard is typically 1:3 to 1:5)
• Use CRM systems to capture detailed client information and meeting notes
• Identify patterns in client buying cycles and budget timing
• Monitor data monthly to catch problems early while there's time to fix them
• Position yourself where your customers can see you—"by the road, not up the hill"
• Understand which lead sources provide your most valuable customers
• Split test marketing materials to identify what resonates with your audience
• Record detailed notes about client needs, budgets and preferences
• Ask for and track referrals to expand your network strategically

Please remember to like and subscribe to the podcast for more insights on optimizing your sales process.

Chapters

• 0:00 Knowing Your Sales Numbers
• 1:02 Understanding Your Customer Journey
• 4:44 Using CRM for Better Insights
• 7:49 Client Buying Cycles and Timing
• 13:32 Monitoring and Acting on Data
• 17:01 The Value of Information Gathering

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:12

So one phrase that you will have heard me use if you listen to me talk about the sales process at any length is knowing your numbers, and that's really what I'm going to talk about in this podcast, and I'm going to talk about how data analytics can help you, but essentially that's what it is.

Speaker 1: 0:28

So it's knowing what your numbers are. That that's important is that if you don't know your numbers, the chances are quite heavily that you are being way less efficient than you think you are. So people tend to be optimistic about their numbers when they don't know them. So before I jump into that, please remember to like subscribe, all the usual things. Now, the first thing I will talk about with data analytics is to know your customer journey. Let's call it that. So what I mean by that is basically what are the steps from you making first contact with a potential customer and you signing off on an order with them. What is the process that you need to go through in order to get from the start to the finish, if we regard the order for the purposes of this podcast as the end of the process? So the first thing to note is that you should be able to define that into very clear stages. If you can't, then you really need to sit back and look at what those stages are. So think about sales you've made. If you've made sales, and what were the steps involved in that process? Did they respond to an ad in social media, for example? Did you have a qualifying call with them? Did you arrange a meeting with them? Was there an evaluation or a demonstration? And then how did the sale occur? So what are the steps? And it's really important to know what those steps are, because then you can then start putting numbers against each stage. So, for example, for every advertisement that you get a response to, how many of those responses resulted in a telephone call? So it may be that you had 10 people respond to an ad and when you try to make a call or follow up with them, only one in 10 would accept the follow-up. So the rest were tire kickers for the one, to a better expression. And what does that tell you? Well, in that instance, if I was to look at a rate like that, so I would typically expect the conversion rates to be roughly one in three.

Speaker 1: 2:44

Now you can do a bit of research to look at your own industry. What are the conversion rates. Hopefully you can find that through Googling, but if you don't have a reference, then I would suggest somewhere between one in three and one in five at each step. Because if you think of it, if you've got five steps in your process and you are converting one in 10 at every step, if you multiply that back, you're looking at at least 50. Actually, it's less than that. Sorry, it's more than that. You're looking at hundreds of inquiries to get an order. So if you're good at the maths you'll work that out.

Speaker 1: 3:24

Always have to sit down and look at these things, but the fact is you need to know what your conversion rates are. So, for example, if I'm putting an ad out there and of those responses that I get to the ad, only one in 10 is moved on to the next stage, I would probably look at the ad to look at whether or not it's tight enough. Am I being specific enough in who I'm targeting? Now, as I've said, this will depend on the industry and this might one in 10 might be normal for the industry you're in, but ideally you want to get these conversion rates as small as possible, because if you are converting, say, one in five, then for every to move from one step to another. You need five people at one step to move on to one person in the next. If you convert one in three, then it's only three people before you move on to the next step. So this is making sense. So this is what I mean by data analytics. And if you start using I'm going to assume you're using a CRM, a customer relations management software package where you can track your contact with clients, how many phone calls you're having with them, keeping note of essentially what happened in those calls, how many meetings you're having with them again summarized meetings and how many orders you're getting, and also where that lead originally came from. All of this stuff is gold for your business, because you may well find that there's a correlation between the people who are most likely to buy and how they found you, you.

Speaker 1: 5:19

Now, if that's the case, then that would or my interpretation of that would be to look at the source that is providing the most successful leads and really focus my marketing, my advertising, on that source. So, again, what we come down to is that knowing your numbers and the more numbers you have, the more you can drill into this you start to see where you are being effective and where you're not being effective. That might be a case of perhaps walking away from that area, or it may be that this is a key area that you're targeting and it just says that your messaging isn't correct, and by messaging, that, essentially, is what happens at any stage. So obviously, there'll be a message in any advertising. You'll be offering a particular proposal, a particular offer for each individual product. So each product has its own offer, each service has its own offer, and you will target a particular avatar for each offer, and how you define that avatar really is important because it tells you where you need to be. Define that avatar it really is important because it tells you where you need to be.

Speaker 1: 6:35

So an analogy that I borrowed from somebody else that I think is very good though, and it's a good way of thinking about this is that if you are selling to people driving down the road past you, you want to be positioned by that road, so you need to be where they are. If you are positioned half a mile back up a hill and you're looking down on the road, you're probably not going to get too much success and it might sound a bit obvious, but unfortunately, a lot of people. That's what they do they stick themselves where they feel they should be and they don't look at where the clients are. So it's really important that you position yourself in a place where you can be easily found, easily seen, and you take it from there. So having these data analytics are really important right from the off. It means that you can make sure you're in the right place, you can make sure the messaging you're using is correct.

Speaker 1: 7:33

If you're not sure how to do that, then a good way of doing it is A-B testing, so split testing. And if you're not familiar with that, essentially an example is running the same ad. So the copy and the headlines are all the same, but you use a different image. So there's one image in the ad and you just run the same ad to the same market over the same period, but with different choice of images. So two images, one in one, one in the other, and what you're looking for is to see if there's a difference between the response to the pictures. So if one ad is more successful, presumably, as nothing else is different, it would be the picture that is doing the work for you and that helps you to fine tune what you're doing from a marketing perspective.

Speaker 1: 8:22

Now, this podcast is not about marketing. My courses are not about marketing. It's about face-to-face sales. But the point is there are numbers all the way through.

Speaker 1: 8:32

And I do know that when I was working as a salesperson for a business, I used to make full use of the CRM and some people felt I wrote a lot of information in there, but what I would do is actually write down my meeting notes. So there'd be however much detail in there I felt was important, and what would be in those notes would be essentially a summary of the discussion, primarily what my client was looking for, where I felt we had a match, any potential issues. I could see all the key things budget, time to purchase, how they were with competition, if I knew that, what they liked about the current solution, what they disliked, all that kind of stuff. Because to me I found that helpful, because I tended to do a lot of one-on-one visits, and by a lot. I would generally do about 16 a week, sometimes 20. And that might not sound like much to you because in your industry that might not be a lot, but in other industries they might only be doing one or two a week.

Speaker 1: 9:31

So again, this is another number how many calls are you making? How many face-to-face contacts are you making with somebody? So I would keep a lot of detail though, so that my CRM was a real knowledge bank for my client base. And good CRM systems will also allow you to pull out the numbers, so it will tell you how many telephone calls, for example, it took to get a meeting set up, how many emails. It will give the source of the original inquiry. You'll have details of any sales that are made. So is this client a one-off? Is he tending to buy a low value item or is he or she a repeat buyer and they tend to buy higher value items? Do they have a regular buying pattern? So these are all things to know about, because once you've gone post-sale, you obviously want to nurture your clients, and it's really good to have a clear view of how best to nurture them.

Speaker 1: 10:29

Some clients so here I'm thinking of government clients, where I might be running on government contracts there were definitely specific times of the year when they would be looking at upcoming requirements. They'd be looking to set budgets for the following year. They would have key projects they were working on. They would have other projects that they might get around to if time and budget permitted. And also there'd be the end of year business. So people who are given an annual budget most businesses I know, and I believe this is still true but if they have, let's say, a $5 million budget and it looks like at the end of the financial year they've only spent four and a half million they can see that the people who control the budgets are probably going to drop their budget to four and a half million or maybe even lower, because they can see that five is too much. So what a lot of people do now you can argue the ethics of this and that's fine. But what a lot of people will do is just make extra purchases to use up that remaining budget and it means they maintain that budget level for the following year. But it's obviously an opportunity to get in some last minute sales for you as a salesperson.

Speaker 1: 11:45

So this is where understanding your clients come in and understanding their buying cycles and what drives them. And all of this can be put into the data analytics. So if you have been going a while, you can look back at the buying history of certain clients and you'll see that there are certain. So, for example, if you're running, let's say, a calendar year from the 1st of July to the 30th of June, which is what happens in Australia you may well find that around May time they're setting the budgets maybe even earlier in April they're looking at the budgets for the following year. Around September they might be placing the initial orders, depending on what the lead time is. So that might be several months, so it might be September or it could be December, but what they will be doing is making sure they get these purchases made and that everything can be delivered easily within the confines of the financial year, because in a lot of cases they won't actually make payment until the goods have been delivered, and sometimes 30 days or 90 days even after the goods have been delivered. So you've understanding your clients' buying cycles and then you know what times of year you need to be seeing them to make sure that you are getting the proportion of business that you would hope to get for the year. So data analytics can definitely help you with that.

Speaker 1: 13:16

Other things that it can help you with is just generally streamlining. So I've already spoken about looking at conversion rates, looking at how you can improve those, and all of this is about streamlining your process. It's about getting more efficient at each stage and, although I did an awful illustration of the numbers, I assure you in the course they are really good. I have properly worked them out, but I'm not that good at doing them. In my head, you can get a very clear advantage of where your weak points are, and this is absolutely fundamental. So in the last podcast, I actually spoke about how to welcome objections, because they give you really valuable feedback that you can use to improve your whole sales process and, in fact, if you're taking that kind of thing on board, the chances are you're going to improve your conversion rate at that stage. So the one-to-one meeting with the client where you are going for the order, going for the close so, again, data analytics are really important because if you are seeing that there is one area in your process where your conversion rate is quite different to what you're getting elsewhere it may well not 100%, but there's a very good chance it's highlighting a stage in your process that is not working properly, whether that's you as a salesperson or something else that's going on there. It's basically underlining that that particular stage is not working so well and what you need to be doing obviously is making sure that you've got good conversion rates at every stage of the process and working back again. It means that to get a particular total number of orders in the year if your conversion rates are good, it takes a lot less effort on your part to actually make sure you're going to hit those numbers.

Speaker 1: 15:08

And the other thing about the analytics is to make sure you keep track of them. I would say definitely monthly. You need to be on top of those numbers. The reason I say monthly is that if there are any problems, you want to be able to pick them up as early as possible. Certainly when it comes to hitting end-of-year targets, you do not want to realize that it's all starting to go horribly wrong nine, ten, eleven months in because you've got very little time to turn things around. If you understand when clients are likely to buy, you'll know what sort of orders you should be getting at any point in the year.

Speaker 1: 15:48

And if you are falling short, you really want to be able to identify a shortfall, I should say as quickly as possible, because then you've got time to remedy it. You might have to just increase advertising. You might have to just run out and see a lot more clients for a week or two or three, whatever it might be, just to get visibility there, get call rates up, that sort of thing. But the point is that you have time where you can fix things. So data analytics covers quite a range of things. I've just highlighted a few.

Speaker 1: 16:23

But in terms of face-to-face selling, these are really important. Knowing your conversion rates, knowing your client journey and also if you are involved in the initial targeting of clients with marketing, it's really essential that you understand where your clients are. But also if you are doing direct sales, it's also important to know where they are because you might want to do cold calling. I've found that to be quite a useful way of generating leads because you can catch people who maybe aren't on social media or who kind of go under your normal radar if you just rely on your regular advertising. So if you know, if you're very clear on who your avatar is, who your ideal client is, then you can really target them at whatever level that you're making contact with people and also when you're asking for referrals.

Speaker 1: 17:16

It's another good time to know that and obviously, if you are asking for referrals, keep track of that, see which people are tending to give you referrals? What kind of clients are they? Who are they referring you to? So it's all about information gathering and, to a degree I would say it's impossible to have too much information. Certainly, in the key areas of your business, you really need to be on top of it. Okay, I'm going to stop there. I hope you found that useful and given you maybe some food for thought. And if you don't know your numbers, it's really important that you start to work them out, because I think you'll be in for a bit of a surprise, possibly not a nice one, but once you've got that information, you can then do something with it.