In recent years, inbound marketing has taken the marketing arena by storm. This content-centric marketing technique proved very effective for attracting and retaining customers.
Inbound marketing is a step away from the traditional “in your face” outbound marketing. Instead, inbound marketing strives to create rapport between a company and its clients. Some great inbound marketing strategies include blogs, seminars, SEO, among others.
Data is at the core of inbound marketing. In fact, the way inbound marketing integrates with sales data tracking is what makes it so effective. What’s more, you don’t even need a whole marketing team to track and analyze sales data.
In this piece, we’ll look at a few ways sales data can help your business drive up its sales through generating leads. This piece is especially useful for business owners who have adopted the inbound approach for their marketing operations.
First, however, let’s look at what exactly sales leads are.
What Are Sales Leads?
Any professional marketer aims to generate as many leads as possible. The challenge is coming up with an economically feasible but yet effective way of doing so.
Sales leads are businesses or individuals who are prospective customers or clients. When you generate a lead, you have engendered a potential customer into future inquiries or transactions with your business.
Sales leads are crucial for businesses to make profits. However, sales leads do more than just boost profit margins. They are also good for improving communication as your company expands.
Sales leads also help keep track of the competition and give you connections to some professionals in your field. These professionals may later become excellent additions to your company.
How Can Sales Data Help Your Company Generate Sales Leads?
Nowadays, data is the language of any marketers or marketing agencies worth their name. Gone are the days when companies relied on hunches or intuition to make crucial business decisions.
With the evolution of technology, internet leads, and the whole social media wave, marketing has become more computer-oriented instead of sales teams with banners and posters.
Any business owner can leverage sales data to help generate more sales leads. What’s more, acquiring and analyzing these sales data isn’t even as hard as most people think.
Here are five ways sales data can help business owners generate new sales leads from clients and B2B companies.
1. Reports on the Number of Sales Each Item Makes
If your business is in the line of selling products, you undoubtedly must have some best sellers. You also must have a few items that don’t fare very well on the market.
Any wise business owner will emphasize the best performing products. Also wise is to take some steps to find out why other products aren’t selling as well as they should.
The sales report by item data is especially useful for new businesses. When you launch a new line of products, it’s imperative to gauge their performance on their market. In doing so, you’ll know whether to boost production or to discontinue the product altogether.
From this data, you can also tweak your inventory control and adapt it to the demand hence generate more leads. If possible, you can find where you can sell off the inventory of the underperforming products.
2. Sales Generated From New Customers and Customers Retained
Nothing shows good performance by the marketing department than a new set of customers. That said, you still need your current customers because they are what keep your business afloat.
You may be surprised that you may have more new customers than the regulars. If such is the case, then you must do something to address the dwindling number of regular customers.
The same applies to the number of new customers. Remember, to keep up with the competition, your business must grow steadily. It can only achieve such growth by getting new customers from new regions.
From the data you acquire, you can then take the necessary steps to address the sales issues. If you don’t see new customer sales, then it’s time to get your sales team on the ground or improve your inbound marketing strategy.
3. Sales Generated From Each Location
When you breach new customer frontiers, you’re never sure of the outcome. Some products perform well, while others don’t. The sales most likely also vary from location to location.
Fortunately, you don’t have to be physically present at each location to know the sales. This sales data will show you how each product performs in each region.
With this sales data, you can pull out or intensify operations in particular regions. When you boost your operations in a thriving region, you can expand your horizons even further and attract more clients from the same or neighboring regions.
What’s more, your POS terminals generate this data in real-time as the sales happen. The next time you have your meeting, you have up-to-date data to discuss.
4. Sales Per Given Time Frame
You can have data on the number of sales made by the year, month, week, day, and even hour. There’s nothing much to this data, especially for established businesses. Surely, most of them are familiar with yearly or quarterly sales,
Take a seminar or a pop-up shop, for instance. You can get useful hourly sales information so you can know when to kick things up a notch and also avoid the embarrassment of your products going out of stock on site.
If things are moving slow, you can have a live broadcast on social media to get the word around fast.
5. Sales Per Employee
Your employees are the backbone of your company. Unfortunately, not all employees do their job as expected.
You can get how much sales each employee makes. In doing so, you can promote performing employees and warn the under-performers accordingly.
Sales Data is the Key to Generating Sales Leads
You don’t have to mobilize entire groups of employees to generate sales leads. Let computers, the internet, and smart devices get sales leads for you through sales data.
However, it is important to have staff who understand and analyze this data effectively for the greatest effect.
Contact us today and leverage sales data to generate new sales leads and drive up your sales.