One of a dealership’s most critical operations is sales, making sales teams an integral part of any business plan. Sales teams oversee efficiently maintaining dealership health by retaining car buyers and acquiring new ones. However, management often skips a crucial stage in developing a sustainable process—analyzing sales goals. 

Understanding sales goals can help dealers create repeatable and consistent methods for analyzing and forecasting sales data, leading to improved long-term profitability. However, not all dealers recognize the collective benefits of instituting these processes.  

This article briefly discusses the sales analysis concept (as it pertains to data) and lists ten significant benefits of using that data to analyze sales goals further. 

What is Sales Analysis? 

Analyzing sales data requires data mining to compare the sales team’s performance to its goals. It details the best- and worst-performing services, selling challenges and market prospects, sales projections, and profitable activities. 

Dealers who regularly analyze sales data have a better understanding of the following, which helps to enhance the sales process: 

• Consumer buying trends 
• Consumer behavior patterns 
• Lead conversion patterns 
• Drop-off patterns 

Most of the time, guesswork and intuition could be more effective approaches to achieving monthly sales targets. Instead, dealers need complex data, and their customer relationship management (CRM) system must be able to record all pertinent data on sold autos. 

Ten Benefits of Analyzing Sales Goals 

Dealers should know which activities are operating efficiently and which require revamping. Sales data analytics assesses the pertinent data to decide how well the dealership achieves revenue targets. 

For the following reasons, dealers may think about including this process in their sales procedures: 

1. Better forecasting. Forecasting projects future sales results. Dealers can use the data from sales forecasting to prepare for upcoming risks, sales opportunities, challenges, and developments.  

2. Increased market reach. Analyzing sales data also provides information on prospective customers, essential for refining sales tactics and customizing fresh marketing initiatives to attract more car buyers. 

3. Improved target marketing. One of the most efficient and cost-efficient marketing techniques for any firm is targeted marketing, which centers on a particular lead segment. As a result, dealers can employ branding and tones that appeal to the target audience, increasing engagement and conversions. 

4. Boosted retention rates. Sales analytics data makes higher retention rates possible, enabling dealers to understand what clients want. To accomplish this, dealers should identify their most profitable clients and develop plans to achieve higher customer retention rates and satisfaction using sales data from those customers. 

5. Improve pipeline management. Pipeline management is essential, particularly if the leads list is constantly expanding. Dealers should only use high-quality leads that increase sales and create a strong funnel that finds profitable clients more efficiently. 

6. Better data-driven decisions. Regular and efficient sales analysis shows how the sales plan develops and assesses each salesperson’s efficiency in real-time. 

7. Clearer value propositions. Every dealer’s value proposition potential is extensible, but maximizing its impact requires a better understanding of what customers expect. Dealers can gain these valuable insights by analyzing sales data to ensure that the value proposition meets those expectations and compels the target audience. 

8. Refocused initiatives. It could be time to reconsider the sustainability of specific customer paradigms if a sizable portion of sales calls and report creation time is devoted to clients that do not generate substantial sales revenue. Dealers can determine whether to shift these efforts to other areas or activities by analyzing sales goals. 

9. Improved customer service. Dealers must review failed upsell attempts to determine what went wrong and how to improve the strategy if they hope to retain more customers. Once sales teams use this data to refine their technique and better understand customer needs, they can upsell and cross-sell to clients who are reluctant to do repeat business due to poor customer experiences. 

10.  More efficient hiring process. Hiring new employees is simpler when dealers understand their sales team’s profitability. As customer bases expand and contract (and the resulting sales revenue fluctuates), dealers can better staff these departments based on what they can afford. 
    
    

The Best Sales Analysis Requires the Best Technology 

Analyzing sales goals can promote dealership growth through the benefits listed above. However, finding and incorporating the proper data analysis into the sales process requires digital solutions that supply a complete front-to-back view of your entire operation. 

Contact us today and discover how DealerLens, Affinitiv’s newest innovation, can help your dealership perform the sales data analyses that offer valuable insights and drive better business decisions.