How can you monitor your sales performance?

By Fabien Paupier

Published: 14 November 2024

Sales is at the heart of your business. It's a question of defining objectives and then giving yourself the means to achieve them. So how do you go about it?

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Your sales strategy

What's at stake?

A company can only develop and survive if it has customers. The sales plan is therefore crucial. The challenge is to :

finding new customers
retaining existing customers
distribute the customer portfolio and the associated turnover in a healthy way.

The business plan

The Business Plan (BP) is your business model. It sets out your value proposition, the context in which you operate, and the levers for developing your business. For example, the BP will show your break-even point, among other indicators. In it, you will set the monthly turnover target, the number of customers to be reached, and so on.

Marketing research

Your marketing and sales strategy must be backed up by this BP. This starts from the contextual elements: market research, study of the competition, and then draws out the concrete elements: marketing mix, operational marketing. Your offer should be developed on the basis of a detailed SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats). This means assessing your environment, as well as your strengths and weaknesses, so that you can position yourself pragmatically and judiciously in your market.

Your sales objectives

Your Sales Action Plan (SAP) is part of a more operational approach. Once your objectives have been set, you need to define precisely the actions you need to take to achieve them. This involves answering the fundamental questions: Who? Who? When? How? The CAP therefore starts from a major objective in the BP, for example: to capture 5% of the small electrical appliance market in 3 years' time, and translates it into sub-objectives, such as: to acquire 15 new customers, to increase our turnover per customer by 20%, to achieve a loyalty rate of 30%.

Your action plan

Each of these objectives needs to be backed up by short- and medium-term actions, with a named person responsible for each: your sales manager, for example, or your entire sales force. Actions can be :

focus on performance: a target of 2 new customers a month, for example,
be organisational: creating pairs of marketers and sales reps, for example,
or even management-related, such as the creation of a target-based bonus.

Steering: the keys to monitoring

Taking a step back

The strategy you have devised will only be useful if you stick to it. The risk is in defining directives without giving yourself the practical means to monitor them. Day-to-day business and emergency management easily take over. So much so that, with our heads in the sand, we forget our good resolutions and unconsciously adopt a management style that is more dependent on the context than proactive.

Setting milestones

So how do you go about it? It's essential to have monitoring indicators. For each action, set yourself a deadline: to have acquired 5 new customers within three months, or to have absorbed 5% growth in turnover within 6 months. And at regular intervals, assess the progress you have made towards meeting these intermediate targets.

Use visual representation

At first sight, figures don't say much, unless you compare them, cross-check them... and draw out an underlying trend. Your data is best presented in graphical form. Visual representation is a decisive help. Certain Business Intelligence (BI) software packages, such as Vizzboard, offer a simple and meaningful way of visualising your data. Without requiring any prior knowledge, the solution provides you with different representations. These can be used by management to take stock and communicate internally.

Deepening the analysis

If your business already has many sources of data, how do you bring them together in a single tool? Here you need to look at the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) available on BI solutions. With a tool like Bime Analytics, for example, the diversity of your data sets is no longer an obstacle... quite the contrary. Capable of connecting to around fifty sources, both web-based and static, the tool mixes all your information and gives you a synthetic and relevant reading.

Analyse your competitive environment

Given that BI solutions are capable of processing vast amounts of data, why not use them for your competitive intelligence? Keeping an eye on your competitors - their offers, prices, practices and innovations - is crucial to your commercial policy. But it can be laborious and time-consuming. Unless your BI tool takes care of it. It's possible with a solution like Human Responsive. The software carries out detailed monitoring of current rates for you, to help you design your marketing campaigns. The aim is to give you a head start over the competition, so that you can ultimately win market share.

Day-to-day management requires the right tools: dashboards with relevant analyses, illustrated with an explicit visual representation, as with Vizzboard, or enriched with in-depth macro-data, as with Bime Analytics. BI offers a level of analysis that is beneficial to the business, both as an aid to decision-making and in the form of active monitoring via a solution such as Human Responsive.