Many people would refer to sales analytics as business analytics, both of which are often considered part of the broader category of sales performance management. Business analytics are determined by technologies, applications, or practices that allow for a historic view into past business performance to gain insight on current business performance, and to help predict future business performance.
Using data and statistical models, businesses can better understand their business performance as well as their customers. The goal behind business analytics is to drive informed decisions when doing business planning, as well as to eventually drive automated business decisions. Business analytics can also be thought of as performance management, and have traditionally been designated to the back office.
Sales Analytics have the same goal as business analytics, to make informed decisions and understand performance, however it’s for front office management, and primarily leveraged to manage people.
Sales analytics applications, such as Cloud9′s applications integrated with Salesforce.com, help you to have clear visibility into your sales pipeline so you can see the company’s performance, individual sales people’s performance, specific deals performance, or regional performance. Having this visibility allows you to be proactive in managing reps, and deals, and better predict future sales.
Data mining and analysis over time allows you to see trends and respond to them, and sales analytics applications allow you to do this in real-time. The “data mining” happens dynamically, leaving you to quickly analyze and make decisions as deals are chaining.
Sales analytics KPIs may include;
- Accounts / Customer metrics
- Pipeline / Opportunity metrics
- Forecasting metrics
- Pipeline Velocity
- Activity metrics
- CRM Adoption
- Sales Effectiveness
- Sales Performance
To learn more about sales analytics, please join us for our Revenue Velocity Forum this October.
Hi, the 2 hyperlinks (sales analytics and Sales analytics applications) referenced in this blog are not accessible: Page Not Found. Do you have the valid links? Thanks.
Thanks for letting us know, we’ve fixed the broken links.