Sales and marketing analytics are essential to unlocking commercially relevant insights, increasing revenue and profitability, and improving brand perception. With the help of the right analytics, you can uncover new markets, new audience niches, areas for future development and much more. Let’s look at what I believe are the best and most important sales and marketing analytics that can help any business grow and succeed. This post builds on my article on the key business analytics tools, which might make good additional background reading.
Business is all about meeting the needs of customers. Unmet need analytics is the process of uncovering whether there are any unmet needs around your product or service or within your market which you could meet to increase customer satisfaction and revenue. Useful tools for unmet need analytics include product reviews, qualitative surveys, focus groups and interviews. You could also use tools like Google Trends to help identify what customers are searching for.
Tip: It is now very cheap and fast to ask your customers questions. Create forums and online focus groups, or invite customers to like your Facebook page and join a feedback group.
If you don’t understand the size and potential of your market you can easily jump to conclusions about how viable your business proposition is. Market size analytics is the process of working out how large the market is for your products and services, and whether there is sufficient growth potential. The size of the market is measured in terms of volume (how many units sold), value (money spent in that market) or frequency (how often a product or service is sold). Useful data includes government data, trade association data, financial data from competitors, and customer surveys.
Tip: Just because a market is large doesn’t mean it’s profitable – especially if most of the customers that want a particular product or service already have one and are unlikely to want another.
Understanding demand is essential in order to remain competitive. Demand forecasting is an area of predictive analytics that seeks to estimate the quantity of a product or service your consumers are likely to buy. It goes beyond educated guesses and looks at historical sales data or current data from test markets. Analytic techniques such as time series analysis can be very useful here.
Tip: The data that you use for Demand forecasting must be clean and accurate. If it is not then the results will always be skewed and could lead you down the wrong path.
Every business needs to know the direction its market is heading in. Market trend analytics is a process of establishing whether a market is growing, stagnant or in decline and how fast that movement is occurring. Understanding market size is important but knowing whether that market is trending up or down is also vital. To monitor market trends you can run business experiments or scenario analysis to see what the market would look like and how it would impact your business in either a growing, stagnating or growth market. Customer surveys and focus groups can also help.
Tip: Stay mindful of the external environment, such as changes to legislation and social expectations.
Traditionally we’ve been told that we need to understand our customers so that we know what they look like and can find more people like them.
