Measuring the performance of your sales team is crucial to maximising your chance of winning deals, and the right sales tools can make that task easier, quicker, and more effective. You’ll be looking to pinpoint both what’s working and what isn’t, and to have accurate, consistent and reliable data to draw on.
You Need Sales Data To Forecast
Trying to forecast sales without any indication of what’s been happening up until now is often little better than guesswork. Forecasts need to be built on solid, reliable sales data if they’re to be worthwhile and allow you to plan for future market conditions and customer behaviour.
Automation Saves On Resources
While inputting sales data manually is possible, it’s also a very inefficient way of doing things. Automating sales tracking has a whole host of benefits: it saves on time and energy, it frees up staff to work on other tasks, and it avoids the errors that tend to come with repetitive manual data entry tasks.
Not All Sales Changes Are Obvious
Some events, such as Christmas, are likely to affect your sales in ways that can be predicted ahead of time. Non-calendar events pose much more of a problem. For example, what happens if your stock is depleted by a flood at a storage location, or a power outage leads to an unexpected spike? Access to accurately tracked sales data makes it easier to pinpoint these events and match them to their causes.
You Can See Long-Term Trends
Looking at your sales performance over a single month or year is useful as far as it goes, but it can give undue prominence to one-off events. With well-designed automated sales tracking software, you’ll be able to see when sales rise, dip, and hold steady over periods of several years. You’ll then be able to respond appropriately, rather than risking overreaction to short-term changes.
Understanding Customer Behaviour
Sales tracking can help you get a feel for not just what your customers are doing, but also why. This is especially valuable when they’re behaving in ways that seem counter-intuitive, for example spending more on heating products in the summer. By meeting your customers’ needs more effectively, you’ll build your reputation with them.
Use Past Data To Predict Future Market Behaviour
If you can see how your customers have reacted to certain events and market conditions in the past, you stand a much better chance of matching what you offer with what they’re looking for in the future. Sales tracking shows you tendencies and patterns in clear, coherent and precise ways that are easily grasped, to allow you to put effective responses into practice.
Find Out More
At Reflex Planning, we’re ready to help you maximise your potential with best-in-class tracking solutions. Get in touch to arrange a free demo today.
