Sales Analytics in simple terms can be defined as the process used to identify, understand, predict and model sales trends and sales results and in this process of understanding of these trends helps its users in finding improvement points. Sales Analytics is used to determine the success of the previous sales drive and forecast in addition to determine how future sales will fare.
Over the years, the rise of information technology helped in the innovation of sales enablement solutions and software products. With more and more information became readily available online in the mid 2000s, companies started taking advantage of it by leveraging big data analytics. Some businesses in 2003 started using predictive analytics generating an average Return on Investment or ROI of 145% as per the study that was undertaken by IDC.
Sales Analytics began to emerge as the scientific approach to selling in 2010 with sales becoming less about certain methodology or personality and more of a number game. The Web analytics and Google analytics can be considered as good examples of sales analytics tools that are specifically designed to track consumer activity on the internet. The demand for sales analytics tools has risen steadily as these tools are unlocking the commercially relevant insights, increasing revenue and profitability and improving brand perception.
Sales Analytics in Event Industry – A Perspective View
In the event industry, respondents are recognizing the importance of leveraging tools to streamline their attendees’ experiences with already existing event technologies. About 44% of companies in event industry are already integrating customer relationship management (CRM) tools with their event technology while 37% of them are using online booking tools with their current event technologies.
Organizations are setting up their sales marketing and event technology stacks to streamline manual processes to provide a seamless experience for the attendees and customers.
With technology providing a giant window to event activities, organizations within the event industry are optimizing value post event with quantitative ROI reports for sponsors that include real time insights to sales analytics metrics such as Capture Rate, Pipeline Booking pace, customer tracking and other marketing metrics. By monitoring engagement data on real time activity dashboards, event managers can see how things are shaping up across the events.
For sales leaders in the event management industry who are able to influence company strategy and decisions can help in achieving future goals and targets by using sales analytics as a tool. It can help the wider company management team in making better decisions. Sales analytics enables the event management team in visualizing their target list and then segmenting it by industry, size and other data metrics.
Sales analytics in the event industry is delivering significant improvements in growth, efficiency and effectiveness. In a survey conducted by McKinsey & Company of more than 1000 sales organizations around the world found that 53% of those that are “High Performing” rate themselves as the effective users of analytics as shown in the below depicted exhibit.
The tangible benefits of sales analytics are yet to be fully utilized when it comes to event management companies. Most of the sales organizations (57%) as per the survey reports do not view themselves as an effective users of advanced sales analytics with many companies still struggling to benefit from even basic analytics. Commercial sales analytics is still in its evolutionary stage with even the most advanced B2B commercial sales analytics programs not being fully used or utilized properly.
Well-designed sales analytics programs for event management firms are delivering significant top line and margin growth by guiding their sales teams and event organizers to make better decisions.
For better results, event management industry should focus on two things such as focusing on areas where sales analytics can create the most value and secondly to implement it wisely. Finally, it can be concluded that in the event industry the adoption of advanced sales analytics has begun to differentiate between the winners and losers of the event management game.
