11.9 Key Takeaways & Terms

• Sales executives track the same metrics as individual salespeople but at the aggregate level.
• Sales executives also look at their firm’s sales relative to their forecasts in order to spot possible trends. A firm’s sales trends affect many of the other decisions the company’s executives have to make, including manufacturing and output decisions.
• Sales managers also have to manage their company’s selling costs. Sales managers are often responsible for a firm’s sales and its profit levels.

Average order value is a metric that reveals how much people are spending during a typical visit to your ecommerce store. You can find this total by dividing the total revenue generated by the total number of sales in a time period.

Analytical dashboards generally analyze larger amounts of data – they are very helpful to understand and identify trends, insights and establish targets based on the information they unearth

Conversion ratios measure how good a salesperson is at moving customers from one stage in the selling cycle to the next.

CRM Process refers to the systematic approach a company takes to managing and nurturing customer relationships

CRM Strategy allows companies to focus on building long-term relationships with customers through a customer-centric approach

CRM Technology: CRM systems and tools provide the infrastructure to support and automate the CRM process

Customer lifetime value (CLV): metric that represents your prediction for how much money a particular customer will spend with your business over their entire relationship with your company

Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) is a (strategy that combines) people, processes and technology that seeks to understand a company’s customers; it is an integrated approach to managing relationships by focusing on customer retention and relationship development

Dashboards are a type of data visualization that provide a heads-up display of critical indicators, letting managers get a graphical glance at key performance metrics

Data visualization is the graphical representation of information and data

Descriptive analytics: calculating some summary statistics such as mean, median, mode and standard deviation

Diagnostic analytics: techniques that can help identify outliers through methods like matching or creating a scatter plot diagram

IDEA (Induct, Develop, Enable, and Assess) is an approach that encompasses the entire training process

KPI: Key Performance Indicators

Lead: a referral to your ecommerce store

Lead conversion is when a lead results in an actual sale.

Lead conversion rate: metric that may help reveal information about the customer experience once a user is on your website or browsing your ecommerce store.

Market share is how much of the market is buying from the firm versus its competitors; sales by product or by customer type; and sales per salesperson.

Operational dashboards look into the current situation and answer: “What is happening now?” This dashboard will monitor real-time data against key metrics and KPIs

Predictive analytics: techniques that involve using regression analysis and attempts to find similarities between historical data sets to be able to forecast into the future

Prescriptive analytics involve using decision support systems, machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze the information and recommend a course of action

Product performance: metric that breaks down sales by individual products

Sales analytics is the process of compiling and analyzing sales data in a way that compares sales expectations with actual sales results.

Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals

Sales funnel analytics: studying the success of ad campaigns and social media posts to find out what’s feeding your sales funnel with the most valuable prospects. You can also use analytics to identify sales funnel leaks—instances where a potential client begins the customer journey, but doesn’t complete a purchase.

Sales growth: a metric that looks at sales reports over a sustained period of time. It compares historical data with current sales performance to determine how much sales have grown or declined over time.

Sales pipeline performance: a metric used to track the customer experience and generate sales forecasts and sales targets based on current conditions.

Sales pipeline velocity is the speed at which a prospect moves through your pipeline and becomes a paying customer

Sell-through rate: the rate at which you can sell off your existing inventory

Strategic dashboards are generally used by executives to keep and eye on the KPIs – these require less frequent updates of data as compared to the operational dashboard and help the executives to summarize performance and keep and eye on the effectiveness of the work they do over a period of time (month, quarter or year)

Win-loss analysis is an “after the battle” review of how well a salesperson performed given the opportunities she faced