Do you closely monitor your key sales metrics? Does your company have a data-driven culture that embraces the use of analytics in its decision-making? If it is a no to both, then you will be in the dark regarding the performance of your sales teams and miss out on vital insights into your customers.
Hubspot’s The Ultimate Guide to Sales Metrics writes: “While metrics are important in every aspect of any business, they’re especially critical in sales. Sales leaders can’t use their intuition to guide their decisions – not only are they dealing with a huge amount of information, but the risk of failure is high.”
The terms “analytics” and “metrics” may conjure images of overwhelming amounts of incomprehensible data, but this is far from the case with Showell. Our built-in analytics are simple to navigate and understand, as well as being enabled by default for everyone, including freemium model users.
What is measured by sales analytics?
“With our analytics, you can accurately track how content is being used by your sales reps. You can track what is being shared with customers and how they interact with the material. It’s easy to spot files that haven't been opened in six months, for example, and closely follow how your sales team is performing,” lists Ville Kleemola, a customer success manager at Showell.
With our analytics, you can accurately track how content is being used by your sales reps.
He adds that they can track anything that the sales rep might need at any point, whether it is a 3D model, PDF brochure, PowerPoint presentation or company video. While this covers the external content for customer-facing interactions, it also measures the use of internal content, such as confidential material and training content.
The data can tell you basic information, like how many times a piece of content has been viewed, shared or downloaded by the customer, to more advanced specifics, like the duration it has been viewed, the most used document types and even the amount of time spent on each page in a document.
How analytics help sales directors
“Content Analytics is limited to the account administrators. Typically, they are the marketing and sales directors. The marketing director is usually in charge of managing the content and administrating the system on a daily basis, but often the sales director also likes to see the analytics to see how the reps are using the platform,” explains Kleemola.
Showell opens up the possibility of analysing and comparing the activity levels of your sales teams.
It opens up the possibility of analyzing and comparing the activity levels of your sales teams. “For example, if some sales reps are closing more deals than others, then you can cross-reference your CRM with Showell analytics to see if they do certain things that can be replicated by their colleagues,” he advises.
One effective feature is the tracking of words entered into the search bar. If “pricing” is a commonly searched term used by your sales reps, you could assume that the pricing information is not easy to find. In addition, repeated search words could tell you that customers are often inquiring about something in meetings for which the reps weren’t prepared.
How analytics help sales reps with customers
Showell’s Share Analytics is one of the most useful tools for sales reps and is available to all users, even on the freemium version. “It’s what you really want to look at because that's where you can see if the customer is actually engaged or not. While Content Analytics helps with spotting trends, this can tell a salesperson if a piece of content was good for their customer,” highlights Kleemola.
Showell’s Share Analytics reveal whether the customer is engaged or not.
When any type of content is shared with a customer, the sales rep individually receives information about who has looked at the shared files and for how long, plus whether they have downloaded them. He notes: “This is especially useful when you’re sending a quote or an agreement because you really want to check if they have gone through the entire document.”
One aspect of Share Analytics that Kleemola describes as ‘powerful’ relates to when the shared material is forwarded to other decision-makers: “The sales rep will get information about that as well. They will see if the link has been opened by one person or by five different people. You’ll even have all the email addresses, too.”
How analytics improve working with dealers
“One of the key pieces of feedback that I have gotten is that you can see the near real-time activity of the users and that is particularly important when it comes to those external sales networks. If the customer gives their dealer access to the Showell platform, but they opt not to use it, then the licences can easily be moved to somebody else,” says Kleemola
Seeing near real-time activity is important when working with external sales networks.
Analytics play an even bigger role for a company with an external sales organization or distribution network since you can clearly see which dealers are using the materials available to them and how they are being used.
“Again, you can see the top sales performers and maybe have a discussion with them. Ask why they are using the platform, what they like and what is their process. You can take the answers and try to duplicate it with the other lower-performing dealers,” he suggests.
Exporting data and respecting user privacy
“Can you export the data?” is one of the FAQs that Kleemola hears from customers and his reply is always, “Yes, you can.” He explains that you can download the data from the system, combine it with other data sets and use business intelligence (BI) or other tools to analyze it.
The pseudonymisation feature can make the analytics anonymous.
Another FAQ concerns respecting data privacy and system security. Showell uses both internal and external audits to ensure that high-security standards are met both at the organization and information system levels, while privacy meets the required level of GDPR compliancy.
“If the customer wants, we can implement pseudonymization to make the analytics anonymous. You’ll still get all of the same information and see how and what the top performers are doing, but they wouldn't be linked to a specific person,” he reassures.
How to start measuring sales analytics
“Everything connected to the analytics is ready to go as soon as you set up the products. You’ll start receiving analytics data from the moment you begin creating or inviting users to the platform. The pseudonymization is the only aspect that needs to be enabled by us,” says Kleemola.
Everything connected to the analytics is ready to go as soon as you set up the products.
When onboarding a new customer, Showell has a training session that covers everything you can do inside the admin, which includes looking at the analytics. Due to no data being available because there are no users or content, an analytics session is booked for a few months after the launch.
“Just today, I had a meeting with a new customer who has just found the analytics. They were surprised by how active their sales team has been so far and they were extremely pleased with the data they saw from the analytics,” he shares.
‘Like playing golf while blindfolded’ – Book a demo
Whether you are a sales director interested in Share Analytics or a marketing director interested in Content Analytics, there is a wealth of easy-to-navigate sales-related data that can satisfy the most inquiring of minds.
“Trying to be successful in sales without tracking numbers is like playing golf while blindfolded,” states The Motley Fool, a private financial and investing advice company. They also list four key reasons why salespeople should track their key sales metrics:
- It boosts revenue
- It saves time
- It increases efficiency
- It helps identify new opportunities
Those are four strong justifications to instil in your company a data-driven culture that embraces the use of analytics in its decision making. With Showell, you can do just that and have the upper hand when knowingly asking customers that question: “Did you have a chance to look at the files I shared?”
To learn more about Showell, book a product demo to receive a personalized guided tour of the platform so you can see it in action. Alternatively, try our brand-new freemium product.