What is sales data? Sales data refers to information collected and analyzed to gain insights into the sales performance of a business or organization.
Sales data refers to the information and metrics related to a company's sale s activities, including the number of sales made, revenue generated, products sold, customer information, sales trends over time, and any other relevant details that provide insights into the company's sales performance and potential areas for improvement.
It’s like a powerful tool that helps you make better decisions, understand your customers, and improve how your organization performs in the future.
It’s super important for sales leaders to know how to understand and use the daily sales data they gather, so they can improve their sales strategies.
To get accurate and timely insights, it’s crucial that your B2B sales data is of high quality.
So, whether you’re a small business owner or part of a big enterprise, sales data is your trusty sidekick on the journey to success!
In this article, we’ll cover some key points:
- How to find and use B2B data to boost sales.
- The five types of sales data that can help your sales team.
- Effective ways to analyze company contact data and more.
Let’s dive in!
How Do You Find Sales Data?
Finding sales data is essential for businesses to track their performance and make informed decisions.
1. Point of Sale Systems (POS):
Many businesses use POS systems to process transactions. These systems automatically collect sales data, including the number of items sold, prices, and transaction times. You can access this data through your POS software.
2. Sales Reports:
Most businesses generate regular sales reports. These documents summarize sales activities over a specific period, usually monthly or quarterly. They provide insight into revenue, product performance, and customer trends.
3. Inventory Management Software:
If you have an inventory management system, it often includes sales data. This data helps you understand stock levels, identify popular products, and predict reorder needs.
4. Customer Relationship Management Software (CRM):
CRM systems like Salesforce or HubSpot often include sales data tracking. They help you manage customer interactions and monitor sales opportunities.
5. Manual Tracking:
For smaller businesses, you can manually track sales using spreadsheets. Record each sale, including date, item sold, price, and customer information.
6. Polls and Feedback:
Customer feedback and surveys can also provide valuable sales insights. They help you understand customer satisfaction and preferences and indirectly influence sales & marketing strategies.
7. B2B sales Data Provider Tools:
If you want to quickly & easily gather business sales data to boost your sales team’s performance, it’s smart to invest in a trustworthy B2B data provider.
There are several great options, like CUFinder, Uplead, and ZoomInfo. These companies specialized in B2B lead generation can assist you in a few ways:
- Creating precise lists of targeted leads.
- Adding high-quality CCPA & GDPR-compliant data to your database.
- Saving time by streamlining your sales prospecting efforts and concentrating on closing deals.
- Identifying prospects at the perfect moment in their buying process
These resources help you analyze sales performance and make data-driven decisions to improve your business.
The Five Types of Sales Data
As mentioned, sales data is essential for businesses to understand customers and make informed decisions.
There are five main types of sales data that companies should pay attention to.
Let’s take a closer look at these:
1. Basic Customer Info (Demographic):
To sell to your customers, you need to know who they are. This includes:
- Their name,
- Age,
- Gender,
- Job,
- Where they live, and
- How to contact them (like their email and phone number).
This information helps create a profile of your typical customer, which can be used to target your advertising and marketing efforts.
2. Company Info (Firmographic):
Similar to customer details, there’s also information about companies. This includes:
- The company’s name,
- Where it’s located,
- How big it is,
- What industry it’s in, and
- How much money it makes.
Just like with customer info, this helps you target your B2B marketing efforts when trying to sell to businesses.
3. Technology Info (Technographic):
This is all about the tools and technology that your potential customers use in their work or personal lives.
Knowing this helps you understand their needs and challenges so you can offer solutions that match what they require.
4. Business Changes (Chronographic):
This data tracks changes within companies, like how many new employees they’ve hired, any new funding they’ve received, or if they’ve acquired other companies.
Keeping an eye on these changes can help you find new opportunities for sales.
5. Customer Behavior (Intent):
This is a valuable source of information. It shows you what kind of content your potential customers like, where they find it, and what products they’re interested in.
Using this data helps you understand what your customers need and how to sell to them effectively.
There are two kinds of behavioral or intent data:
- First-party behavioral data: Data a business gathers about its users from its own platforms and website.
- Third-party behavioral data: Data collected from various websites, focusing on a particular category. It provides a broader understanding of a prospect’s online activities.
Combining first-party and third-party intent data is the best approach to ensure no ideal prospects are missed.
How Is Sales Data Used?
Sales data helps your sales and marketing team in many ways:
1. Find New Opportunities:
Your sales team needs good data to find potential customers. Knowing their names, companies, job titles, emails, and phone numbers is crucial.
It helps your team identify who might buy from you and who’s ready for upselling.
2. Avoid Wrong Customers:
Selling to the wrong customers can hurt your business. Sales data helps you check if customers are a good fit for your product and have the resources, skills, and goals aligned with your business.
3. Improve Prospecting for Sales:
To reach the right customers, your team needs data on prospects, like their names, job titles, company info, and contact details.
4. Optimize Sales:
Sales data helps you see how your team works and where improvements are needed.
You can track progress, identify problems, and make your sales process better.
5. Forecast Sales:
By analyzing data like income, location, industry news, and economic factors, you can predict future sales and take action to avoid problems.
6. Monitor Performance:
Measuring sales metrics like lead velocity, costs, and outcomes helps you see how well your team is doing and make changes to improve.
7. Support Decisions:
Keeping data updated and consistent helps with decision-making. It predicts trends, creates opportunities and boosts revenue. A data-driven approach empowers your sales team.
Examples of Sales Data Analysis Tools
To succeed in the sales data analysis process, you can use sales data analytics tools like Salesforce Analytics Cloud.
Sales data analytics tools play a crucial role in helping companies make informed decisions, optimize sales strategies, simplify the process of analyzing sales data, provide more valuable insights, and ultimately boost revenue.
Here are some top sales data analysis tools:
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Tableau
- Google Analytics
- LinkedIn Analytics
- Microsoft Power BI
- Zoho CRM
- InsightSquared
- Pipedrive
- Looker
- Domo
You can try any of these analysis tools you want. From there, there are sample Excel files for sales data that you can download.
Excel practice and utilizing sample Excel or template Excel files are excellent starting points for mastering sales data analysis.
How Do You Analyze Sales Data?
Analyzing sales data is essential for businesses to make smart decisions and boost their success.
Here’s a simple guide on how to do it:
1. Gather Your Data:
Start by collecting all your sales information, like sales numbers, customer details, and purchase history. Ensure your data is accurate & complete and that the data entry is proper.
2. Choose Key Metrics:
Identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most to your business. Common KPIs include sales revenue, profit margins, and customer acquisition cost.
3. Visualize Your Data:
Create charts, graphs, or dashboards to make your data more understandable. Visual representations help you spot trends, patterns, and unusual data points.
4. Identify Insights:
Your data analysis is essential to find insights. Are there specific products or regions performing exceptionally well or poorly? Are there sales trends over time?
5. Monitor Progress:
Continuously analyze and monitor your sales data. This helps you adapt to changing market conditions and improve your business over time.
In general, sales analysis empowers you to make data-driven decisions and improve your business’s performance.
Where Is Sales Data Collected From?
Sales teams can gather valuable data from various public and private sources, including:
1. CRM software: It holds a wealth of sales data, such as customer profiles, sales performance metrics, and forecasts.
2. Transaction history: Examining past purchases reveals customer trends and preferences.
3. Customer surveys: Surveys, conducted via email or website, provide detailed insights into customer preferences.
4. Customer support tools: Interactions with the support team offer valuable information about customer needs, preferences, and interests for cross-selling and upselling.
5. Web analytics tools: Utilizing tools like Google Analytics, one can track website visitors and their interactions.
6. Online subscription or payment forms: Collecting basic customer information through forms on the website, like email sign-ups or trial & paid requests.
7. Marketing platforms: Analyzing data from online advertising and social media campaigns helps understand the audience and their interests.
Get Quality Data for Your Team with CUFinder
If you want to reach your ideal customers faster and improve the quality of your leads, CUFinder is the best option for you.
It helps you to access the most high-quality and up-to-date B2B sales data, including verified emails, popular social media profiles, phone numbers, etc., in an Excel file.
Their high-quality, real-time B2B data is GDPR & CCPA-compliant, tailored to your specific needs, and empowers your team to make informed decisions.
Here’s an Excel sheet image of sales data results from CUFinder that provides complete information on your target leads.
Now, say goodbye to guesswork and unlock the power of data-driven strategies by trying CUFinder’s Enrichment and Prospect Engines.
Conclusion
Let’s go back to the first question: What is sales data? Sales data is a critical set of information that records a company’s transactions and revenue.
It provides insights into product performance, customer behavior, and overall business health, as well as drives informed decisions for growth and profitability.