From the course: Business Analytics: Sales Data

Tools to track sales data

From the course: Business Analytics: Sales Data

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Tools to track sales data

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- [Instructor] If you can study your sales data, then you can identify trends that will lead you to better decisions. But before you can do this, you need to ensure that you're tracking your sales data effectively. There are three great data sources that can help you lay the foundations for sales analytics. First, the most basic and easiest form of tracking sales data involves using credit card payment processing companies like Stripe, Clover, and Square. These tools will accomplish tracking what and when a product was bought, the level of discount among other data points automatically. You can take this one step further with a little bit of a manual setup to include category, location, price point, and many other detailed data points. Using these platforms empowers you to simply download the transaction history into Excel and start doing some analysis. This data gives you the ability to study your transactions history at the aggregate level, and uncover trends across your whole customer base. For example, you may find that one product is outselling all the other products and you are getting a huge amount of traction on just this one product line. If you have a larger organization or your customers are likely to buy on a repeated basis, you may want to start using a customer relationship management tool or a CRM tool such as Salesforce. It's usually much easier to resell to an existing customer than find a brand new one. Now, setting up a CRM is a lot more complicated than just implementing a payment processing software. You need to think hard about what aspects of your customers that you want to track. With Salesforce, you can track purchase history, customer interactions, lead source, industry, buying behavior and customer demographics. All these data points can help you evaluate which of your customers are ready to purchase from you again. And finally, we have an even more advanced way of tracking sales through Google Analytics. When implemented correctly, Google Analytics enables you to see what marketing campaigns, channels and webpages are leading to sales. Now, Google Analytics can also show you demographic data such as age and location. The setup for Google Analytics can be a little bit tricky. So you may want to hire an expert to handle the implementation. But once you get it up and running, it's a very powerful tool. For example, you need to track goal conversions. But before you can do that you need to define what your goals are for your organization. Some goal conversions could downloads or email signups. You really need to think through what customer actions are valuable for you and your organization. Are you using any of these data sources to track your sales trends? Well, if not, there's never been a better time than now to start.

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