Sales analytics should be about more than simply furthering your understanding of the sales process — it should be about empowering you to ACT on that understanding in real-time.
Even though the best vendors in customer relationship management and enterprise resource platforms offer you a myriad of analytics accelerators, dashboards, and business intelligence tools, most of the data you uncover in your CRM and ERP solutions is “Monday-morning quarterbacking” data: The data shows we did X, Y, and Z wrongly in our last sale — let’s get ‘em next time!
However, the best CPQ software vendors deliver solutions that enable you to view and respond to business intelligence as it’s being collected and analyzed.
And this isn’t just any data, but perhaps the most critical “bottom-line” data there is — the data that tells you why some sales proposals get signed, and why others die on the vine.
What’s worth tracking?
There are definitely some well-established, high-level sales metrics you should be tracking — such as sales during a given time period or of a given product, sales to new vs. existing customers, and lead-sources, to name a few.
These metrics are critical to planning new products, developing new marketing campaigns, and enhancing sales staff (both in numbers and know-how).
But forward-thinking companies are digging in to track every step in the proposal process because it’s that data that can help move the needle in real-time.
For example, when you know what lead source worked well, sure, you can plan for better results next quarter. But knowing which proposals have stalled now may help you enjoy better results THIS quarter.
While most CPQ solutions originated to speed and improve the creation of sales proposals, the best CPQ software vendors currently offer solutions that are as much, or more, about tracking and optimizing what happens after a proposal is created.
Because addressing those steps in the sales process — the sending, the replying, the revising, the closing, and the ability to optimize on the fly — will do more to immediately impact your bottom line than assessing any lead source.
What metrics should be targeted?
Obviously, the main metric is closing rates, and some CPQ vendors report that using the software in the sales processes results in a 30% increase in wins.
One of our customers told us about those kinds of improvements, but also about some additional metrics that made a big splash.
By adding IQX’s CPQ to Zoho CRM, a manufacturing client saw the time it took to create a quote reduced by more than 50%, and they saw errors in quotes reduced by a whopping 95%. These metrics are easily part of what can drive an increase in overall close rates.
But a number that really stuck out in this case study was that onboarding time for new reps was reduced by 50%. So even though it’s not a metric that affects your bottom-line in real-time, it does deliver the benefit of real-time scalability.
How? Suppose data from the high-level metrics outlined earlier shows your business is seasonal. You’ll need to get salespeople up and running when the seasonal shift arrives, and if you can spend 50% less time getting them equipped to close business, you may rest assured your bottom line will benefit.
So while monitoring and reporting have always been essential to improving sales processes, with CPQ you can enjoy the metrics that help you make improvements in real-time.
