What if we could predict the future? How would that change our business?
While sales and marketing is a “numbers game,” there’s more to it than simply plastering your services everywhere, hoping that someone will buy.
Insert the modern-day advancement of sales and marketing analytics.
Learning what analytics to use can help you make better decisions and help you forecast how customers will respond. As a result, you can predict your potential revenue moving forward.
Pretty cool, right?
Let’s dive into sales and marketing analytics and how you can leverage it to improve your business.
Contents
What are sales and marketing analytics?
Sales and marketing analytics comprises the systems and processes that allow your team to evaluate the success of their initiatives by measuring performance using important business metrics, such as marketing attribution, ROI, and overall sales and marketing effectiveness.
In other words, these analytics tells you how your sales and marketing efforts are performing.
While the term is quite broad, businesses need to understand how to track, measure, and analyze every stage of the customer journey.
Consider the are metrics for all stages of the funnel, from top-of-funnel down to the bottom of the funnel.
Before you can track your analytics, it’s essential to have a deep understanding of the desired result at each step of the customer journey.
For example, you’ll want to analyze metrics such as views, impressions, and clicks at the top of the funnel. In the middle, it’s all about capturing leads and moving them into your lead nurturing campaign. And the bottom of the funnel, the metrics are centered around sales conversions, such as booked appointments and lead-to-close ratios.
Why do I need sales and marketing analytics
Ultimately, it comes down to results.
Analytics allow businesses to make more informed decisions based on the data presented.
For example, top-of-funnel marketing analytics can help you optimize your marketing spend for the most effective channels for generating leads. Marketing analytics can be used to answer strategic questions such as:
- Which audience segments should our campaigns target?
- Which marketing channels should we focus on to reach a particular segment?
- What messaging, copy, and creatives should we use to convince each segment to buy from us?
- How much does it cost to acquire new leads? And how much can we afford to spend on acquiring new leads based on our existing conversion rate?
- What’s our return on marketing investment across the various marketing channels?
Conversely, sales analytics can be used as a tool to answer strategic questions related to conversion, such as:
- Which type of leads are our highest value customers?
- Where are our best customers coming from?
- Which sales enablement content and sales strategies are effective and which aren’t?
- Are our sales training programs working or not?
Incorporating analytics into your company is integral to achieving your business objectives.
According to a study performed by McKinsey, data-driven companies are:
- 6 times as likely to retain their current customers
- 19 times as likely to be profitable
- 23 times more likely to succeed with customer acquisition
Consider the infographic below.
By optimizing your marketing approach, you’ll be able to deliver more effective and relevant content to prospects, thus improving your conversions.
Types of analytics
There are many types of analytics like web analytics, social media analytics, etc. But we can group them into 3 main categories:
- Descriptive analytics answers definitive questions such as “what has happened?”
- Predictive analytics answers hypothetical questions such as “what is likely to happen?”
- Prescriptive analytics answers questions like “what should we do based on what has already happened and what is likely to happen?”
Let’s take a closer look at what each one means:
Descriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics are metrics that inform you of what happened in the past.
These data points help you understand past sales and marketing performance and provide context for what’s currently happening.
For example, you can compare two ad campaigns and recognize patterns about why one may have outperformed the other. Perhaps, it was the ad creative, or it was targeted to a more relevant audience.
Descriptive analytics provides a means for you to understand what happened and why.
While the primary objective of descriptive analytics isn’t to predict future events, it is nevertheless useful for prediction.
Predictive analytics
Predictive analytics is a type of data science that utilizes past data to make future predictions about potential outcomes. This usually involves large volumes of data along with machine learning algorithms that use data to make increasingly accurate predictions over time.
For instance, a machine learning algorithm can find clusters in your marketing audience to predict the most profitable segments to target based on interests, demographics, and other factors.
Another example of predictive analytics is lead scoring.
Encharge helps you predict whether a prospect will make a purchase or not. Through lead scoring, the system for measuring a prospect’s qualifications and engagement with your brand, marketers can determine the likelihood that each person will purchase.
In this automation flow, you can see that Encharge lets you build sequences based on a prospect’s lead score value.
High-value prospects can be moved into high-priority follow-up from your sales reps or into a different sequence, while low-value prospects can be sent to a remarketing campaign to nurture those leads further.
Prescriptive analytics
Prescriptive analytics focuses on utilizing past marketing data to recommend impactful things you can do.
This type of analytics focuses less on what will happen and more on how it will impact what happens.
Your predictive analytics suggests that your website will receive an influx of new visitors. How can you effectively take advantage of your new visitors? Prescriptive analytics helps you pick the best messaging, deals, and products to highlight for maximum profits.
For example, sales enablement automation tools like High Spot can help sales reps select the right sales content to provide to their prospect during a call. Not to mention, it can even prompt specific discovery questions relevant to what they’re looking for. Using AI and machine learning to offer recommendations takes analytics one step further and will help businesses give their prospects and customers the best possible experience.
Best sales metrics to track for growth
Data is the heart of your sales analytics. Before you dive into using analytics, you need to understand the various key performance indicators and metrics you’re looking at and why you should measure them.
Below are several sales analytics metrics you should consider. While sales teams mostly use these metrics, revenue marketing teams can also be hеld accountable for them.
Sales growth
This metric shows how your sales revenue has grown or shrunk based on a particular time period. It’s an actionable metric that can be used to optimize the sales process and strategies.
Sales target
What are the targets for the month, quarter, and year? Setting these targets allows you to create a plan to hit those sales goals. This could be a specific revenue generated or the number of new customers acquired.
Sales opportunities
This KPI defines the effectiveness of your sales process by telling you the number of sales opportunities that your salespeople are creating. Sales managers use it to forecast sales and determine the most critical opportunities.
Lead conversion rate
Ever wonder how many leads are converting into sales? If leads are flaking on your reps, more training may need to be provided. You can work backward by understanding how and why leads are converting to formulate a plan for acquiring future customers.
Pipeline value
This metric informs you of the expected revenue from the different sales opportunities in the specific time frame. You can get an overview of the value of the current deals in the pipeline and the progress that your sales reps are making towards those goals.
Using a sales pipeline tracking system is a great way to forecast the sales for the month or quarter.
Average conversion time
One way to increase annual growth is to decrease the sales cycle. The average conversion time provides insight into the productivity of your funnel by informing you how long it takes for a lead to convert, thus giving you a bird’s eye view of your sales pipeline.
Number of demo calls booked
The number of calls booked is a great indicator of the health of your sales funnel. A low number of calls booked means there are issues at the top and middle parts of the funnel.
Calls and emails per rep
These metrics provide you with the volume of calls and emails that your reps are making over the course of a day, week, or month. It serves as a productivity metric to inform you how many people your reps are in contact with every day. Also, it lets you know if something is off with your sales funnel.
Quote to close rate
This determines the percentage of interested prospects who convert into paying customers. The quote to close rate illustrates how effectively your sales team can move prospects through the sales funnel.
Average purchase value
Boosting the average purchase value is an easy way to increase revenue without adding much effort or complexity to your sales funnel. This metric calculates the average value of each transaction.
Best marketing metrics to track for growth
There are many facets to marketing. You’ll need to track various marketing channels, the campaigns that drive leads, the volume of your web traffic, and the results of your lead nurturing campaigns. Here are the most crucial marketing analytics to track that drive results:
Cost per lead
How much does it cost to bring in a new lead? The lower the cost, the better. That means your marketing efforts are more efficient, allowing you to be more profitable as a company.
Most ad platforms like Facebook or Google will break down these metrics so you can see how much it costs to capture a single lead.
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales qualified leads (SQLs)
The two common types of leads are marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads. A lead is marketing qualified and has shown interest in what a company has to offer based on their marketing efforts.
Sales-qualified leads have shown genuine interest in your product or service and are ready to speak with a salesperson. Since it’s important to convert as many MQLs into SQLs, your goal should be to determine the ratio between the two.
As a marketer, your responsibility is to capture leads and nurture MQLs into SQLs. From there, it’s the salesperson’s job to turn the SQL into an opportunity, then ultimately a sale.
Customer retention
It’s cheaper to retain customers than to acquire new ones continually. While marketing or sales may not be responsible for fulfillment, they can aid in maintaining a solid relationship with customers and provide useful content to help them like it’s worth sticking around.
In the same breath, ensure you know your average customer lifetime value. This lets you plan your marketing budget to see how much you can spend to remain profitable. Businesses with a strong back-end and recurring revenue model can break even or incur a loss upfront to acquire more customers.
Unique web visitors
While total web traffic is a good metric, it doesn’t account for unique visitors. Repeat visitors may not contribute to new leads or sales. Thus, it’s crucial to track the number of unique web visitors per month and measure that against the number of leads converted.
Organic traffic
Nearly every business wants to drive more traffic from their organic marketing strategy versus their paid campaigns. That’s because organic search traffic is cheaper to obtain, which means your business will be more profitable.
Form conversion rates
How well are your landing pages and forms converting? Often, you’ll want to ensure that the ad copy matches the landing page. Also, you’ll want to ensure that the offer is valuable and attractive enough for your audience to want to convert. Measure the conversion rate of your forms and landing pages.
Social media reach
Social media helps improve brand equity and can help you capture leads. Knowing the effectiveness of your social media posts and campaigns will help you increase followers, boost engagement and capture more leads.
Email engagement metrics
Email marketing metrics such as open rate, click rate, unsubscribes, and purchases from email would indicate how well your email campaigns perform and help you gauge if you need to make any changes to your email messages.
Use marketing analytics tools to improve marketing ROI
When it comes to marketing analytics like Google Analytics, always remember the old saying “garbage in, garbage out,” meaning you should ensure only good data comes in.
This can be done by keeping customer databases up to date, integrating data from your marketing stack, and tracking costs. Here are three ways to use marketing analytics to improve your campaigns.
At the very core of every marketing campaign, it’s important to track the effectiveness of your campaigns and each marketing channel. By tracking the ROI of any given campaign, you can quantify what channels work best for your business.
Leverage UTM links
UTM links enable marketers to track the source of the traffic. This is important, especially when quantifying the ROI of different campaigns from multiple channels that send traffic to one webpage.
UTM codes are unique snippets of text added to the end of a URL to track the source of website traffic when users click on a particular. Marketers customize this text to match the webpage to attribute the success of a campaign to specific pieces of content.
If you’re promoting a campaign on social, you’ll know how much traffic came from social media. However, building a UTM code can tell you how much of that traffic came from Facebook or even a particular post on Facebook.
Some marketing automation tools like Encharge support automatically generating UTM links when building email campaigns.
Use predictive marketing analytics to boost sales
A wide variety of data, such as purchase history, company size, region, and behavioral patterns, help business owners predict outcomes.
Predictive analytics in the marketing context refers to using current or historical data with statistical techniques like predictive modeling, data mining, and machine learning to assess the likelihood of a specific future event.
New customer acquisition using identification modeling
Take your user segmentation a step further by using your customer data to build identification models. In practice, this means identifying and targeting prospects that resemble your current customers in a meaningful way.
Facebook’s lookalike audience lets you upload a list of the emails of your best customers. Facebook will then show ads to people similar to your customers.
Customer and audience segmentation
If you are unsure whether you should segment your audience based on their demographics, interests, firmographics, behavior, or any other variable, predictive marketing analytics can help.
By experimenting with different cluster models, you can find patterns that you may not have expected and thus arrive at audience segments that make the most sense for your business.
How to leverage CRM data for growth
A CRM has a wealth of data that can guide your company in boosting your sales strategy effectiveness.
CRM data helps you identify opportunities and spot risks in real-time. Data collected through various reports aid in understanding what’s working and which sales areas need your attention. Here is how CRM data benefits your sales strategy:
Activity insights – understanding how reps are spending their time
How many calls did each rep make in a specific time period, and how many clients did they follow up through emails or other channels?
A sales manager can determine the appropriate number of calls or demos that need to be done in a month to achieve their desired revenue goal.
Suppose your sales team wastes time with manual tasks such as finding sales enablement content or focusing on unqualified prospects. In that case, you’ll need to achieve a better marketing and sales alignment within your company to ensure you maximize your sales team’s productivity. You can also automate repetitive sales and marketing tasks using tools like Encharge.
Sales forecasting – improved sales planning
A forecasted sales report compares the sales forecast to the actual sales report within a specific period of time.
It shows the true value of your sales opportunities and helps companies track team performance and identify revenue gaps. Then sales managers can strategize on how they can increase their sales forecast based on their current opportunities.
Most CRM tools let you customize the report based on the entire sales team or individual reps.
Sales pipeline – measure lead to closure
Using the sales pipeline data in your CRM, you can visualize the progress of every deal. For instance, let’s say you want to know the status of a particular deal. Instead of relying on written notes, you can glance at your CRM sales pipeline.
You’ll see which stage of the sales pipeline the deal is at and check all of the past conversations you had with the prospect.
Everything is systematically streamlined into one place. A CRM helps you determine if your sales pipeline has enough deals to fulfill your monthly or quarterly sales targets.
- Track the percentage of deals that are moving from one stage to another
- You can track the length of time it takes to close a deal.
- View the average size and value of each deal.
- See which sales stages have the maximum stalled deals.
This data will help you work on improvements to decrease your deal closure time.
Encharge can supercharge your sales and marketing analytics
Take the stress out of hitting your business goals by strategically using the sales and marketing analytics tools that are built into your marketing automation and CRM tools.
Encharge integrates with CRM tools like HubSpot and many other tools, letting you connect data seamlessly so that your marketing and sales team receives a complete profile of your prospects and customers.
Nov 2022 Update: We redesigned and rebuilt our HubSpot integration from scratch. Now it supports a two-way sync of contact and company data, syncing of email activity, and more than 14 automation steps you can use in your flows to automate all of your HubSpot sales processes!
Not to mention, Encharge lets you score, segment, and view lead nurture analytics to help you personalize your marketing and sales efforts. Sign up for a free 14-day trial with Encharge and benefit from sales and marketing analytics today!
