As a sales operations professional, you are tasked with making decisions based on sales data to help define a winning sales strategy. But how do you know that you are measuring the key metrics, finding opportunities, pinpointing inefficiencies and truly setting the sales team up for success? Sales ops analytics is your answer.
With sales analytics, you can bring a strategic system to sales and develop best practices based on robust real-time data and informed decisions. In this article, we’ll break down what sales analytics is, why you need it, and the best tools to make it happen. Let’s take a look:
What is Sales Ops Analytics
Sales ops analytics is based on specific sales metrics and KPIs, providing data-driven insight into sales opportunities specific to certain situations or reps as well as big picture problems or successes for the company.
These robust insights can then be translated into actionable recommendations that are handed over to the sales enablement team, sales management, and sales reps. Providing invaluable information when they need it and assuring all the necessary systems are in place.
When your goal, as a sales ops professional, is to increase sales productivity, streamline processes, and drive front line sales teams, sales analytics can be a game-changer. Sales analytics help you track key metrics and develop a strong strategy that truly enables the sales reps.
You’ll be able to define the most effective sales actions at the most opportune time for the right type of customer. Sales analytics brings together strategic sales operations and tactical sales actions to increase sales performance and efficiency like never before.
In short — tracking, automating, and acting on sales analytics allows sales operations professionals to give sales reps the boost they need to efficiently engage modern buyers and stay ahead of competitors. Your data-based recommendations make it easier for both your front line sales reps to feel confident in their work with prospects and assist sales leadership in directing those sales efforts.
Important Metrics For Sales Ops Analytics
To be successful in sales operations you have to make sure you are tracking and analyzing the metrics and KPIs that matter most. The ones that will help you pinpoint opportunities and stay ahead of problems. Even more importantly, they should be measured and acted upon regularly.
As we mentioned above, two of the biggest goals in sales operations are to increase sales efficiency and increase sales productivity. So, with sales op analytics, to optimize sales your focus should be on metrics that revolve around those two categories: efficiency and productivity. Things like pipeline data metrics, particular sales activities, and more.
Of course, preferred metrics are going to vary from organization to organization. These metrics below are ones commonly tracked by sales ops teams and some of the most important that you should be analyzing, separated into the two target categories:
Efficiency
- Sales Cycle Length – Measures the average amount of time it takes for sales reps to close a deal.
- Lead Response Time – Measures the time it takes leads to positively respond to sales pitches, demos, or calls to action.
- Active Selling Time – Measures the actual time sellers are outreaching to prospects or are “in the field” selling compared to administrative tasks, meetings, and training.
- Prospect Meetings – Measures the number of meetings each rep sets up in a specified period compared to their prospecting activity.
- Pipeline Efficiency – Measures how efficiently reps are managing their individual pipelines. This helps determine where any bottlenecks in the pipeline might be.
- Potential Value Of Individual Prospects – Measures the potential value of prospects, especially upsell and cross-sell opportunities. This helps sales reps prioritize prospect lists and increase efficiency.
Productivity
- Win Rate – Measures the number of deals won in comparison to the total number of deals overall (both won and lost).
- Deal Size – Measures the average value of deals that sales rep are closing. This should be measured as an overall team number and per rep.
- Quota Achievement Rate – Measures the percentage of sales reps on the team who have met their sales quota during a set period.
- Pipeline Value – Measures the estimated value of the pipeline as a whole at any given time as well as each stage of the pipeline individually. You can also use this information to make a profit/loss forecast.
- Forecast Accuracy – Measures the accuracy rates of predicted forecasts versus actual sales results.
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) – Measures the amount of money you spend on marketing, advertising, and sales versus the number of new sales you get over a set period.
- Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) – Measures how much your company makes from each customer by comparing the average revenue per customer to the customer churn.
Best Sales Ops Analytics Tools
In the sales environment of 2020, there’s an abundance of sales tools available. Don’t let this overwhelm you when trying to determine the best tools for your sales operations tech stack. Remember to focus on the goals of increasing sales efficiency and productivity and consolidate by utilizing tools that serve multiple purposes.
Here are a few examples of some of the best sales ops tools available:
Accent Accelerate –
Accent Accelerate has become one of the top sales enablement tools and can be a very valuable tool to optimize your sales operations. The platform enables you to creatively visualize your sales activity and pinpoint valuable pipeline opportunities. Accent Accelerate delivers data-driven visualizations that enable a quicker understanding of sales opportunities, allowing you to develop a clear strategy and actionable next steps.
Outreach –
Outreach makes it easy to gain actionable insights at a glance. The visually rich dashboard and analytics capabilities provide an intuitive and comprehensive platform to view sales team data as a whole as well as individual reps’ top-line performance metrics. You can then quickly gauge the health of the business and any performance gaps between reps. Allowing you to better determine which actions should be taken first or which reps need more coaching now.
InsightSquared –
The AI-powered revenue intelligence software InsightSquared has the ability to provide a huge amount of sales data, pinpoint key metrics, and gain insight to optimize your sales revenue operations and achieve predictable growth. Through this powerful platform, you can conduct data-driven planning and analysis and make intelligent, informed decisions. InsightSquared acts as your “operating system” for your sales operations.
Einstein Analytics From Salesforce –
A visually-dynamic business intelligence software, Einstein Analytics helps you make informed sales process decisions like never before. You can more effectively spot opportunities, get ahead of problems, forecast and predict sales outcomes, and more. You can easily tailor your analytics to your business all onto one visual dashboard that brings all of your data onto on platform, even from external sources. With Einstein Analytics, through transparent, understandable AI models, you and your sales op team can learn what happened, why it happened, what may happen in the near future, and what to do about it.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator –
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great social selling tool for sales operations and sales reps to utilize. This platform will provide unique insights about the usage and performance of social selling activities and will help your sales team find the right prospects faster and grow relationships with customers leveraging the best of LinkedIn’s tools. The suite of tools within what they call the Sales Navigator Team, can integrate with many popular CRMs and enable your organization to build trust with your prospects and customers through social selling.
Map My Customers –
Built specifically with field sales reps in mind, Map My Customers’ mobile-friendly platform acts as an outside sales CRM, data analytics software, route mapping platform, and sales enablement tool all in one. Map My Customers also integrates with dozens of the most popular CRMs and apps, creating a central hub built around your workflow. The robust platform enables you to track sales analytics and make actionable recommendations while also allowing your sales reps to make more sales in less time. Improving efficiency, productivity, and profitability of your sales team and its processes.
Wrapping It All Up
Your company’s sales team is responsible for growing new revenue and building a larger client base, and your main objective is to help them do that quicker and more effectively on a day to day basis.
While sales reps on the front lines are operating from tactical perspectives, the best sales ops professionals are working from a strategic standpoint and sales analytics tools help you do just that. By using the data tracked for key sales analytics metrics, like the ones we pinpointed above, you can develop a sound strategy that determines what tactical sales actions would be most effective at particular times.
Sales analytics provide actionable insights and the right tools, like the ones mentioned in this article, will enable you to help optimize your sales team’s productivity and efficiency. This, in turn, will ensure continuous improvement in both the top-line and bottom-line performance of your company.
