What specific analytical skills are needed for Sales Managers in the era of Analytics?
Sales Organization, including Sales Director, Account Managers, Channel Managers, Regional Managers, Area Managers, Zonal Managers, Territory Managers are constantly challenged to break the sealing – go beyond their best performance in the recent past. While they adopt different strategies to achieve business goals, the availability of data or information about the customers, their needs, channel partners, capability and capacity, supply chain efficacy, pricing insights, competition activities, below the line (BTL) activities has improved in the recent decade due to sales process automation, ERP, CRM and other sales enablement tools.
However, without sufficient analytical skills to analyze this data and draw meaningful insights, results are not guaranteed. Sales Reporting and Business Intelligence (BI) tools provide dashboards and scorecards that enable Sales Managers to analyze the information for constructive decision making. But that’s just the least value one can extract from the data.
Business Outcomes that can drastically improve through enhanced sales analytics skills are:
- Improvement in Market Share
- Improvement in Product Contribution and Gross Margin
- Seasonal Plan – Forecasting, Pricing & profitability improvement
- Effectiveness of Promotions
- Distributor/Dealer/Retailer Profitability
- Improvement in Conversion %
- Penetration of fast moving products
- Improvement in Cross-selling and Up-selling
- Network Expansion planning
- Optimization of Resource allocation
- Reduction in stock-outs
- Sales staff performance improvement
Here’s a list of Sales Analytics skills and difficulty level that Sales Managers need in the era of Analytics:
| Difficulty Level | Analytics Skills |
| Beginner | Data Summarization |
| Beginner | Data Visualization |
| Beginner | Segmentation Analysis |
| Beginner | Trend Analysis |
| Intermediate | Time Series Forecasting |
| Intermediate | Data pattern analysis |
| Advanced | Hypothesis formulation and Hypothesis testing |
| Advanced | Data clustering |
| Advanced | Conjoint Analysis |
| Advanced | Predictive analysis and modelling |