More Maturity Required for Sales Analytics

There’s room for improvement in sales analytics, according to a new study from Ventana Research. Ventana shows that although organizations use a variety of sales analytics, sales has not yet automated many of the underlying data integration and analytics operations needed to generate metrics.

Ventana’s newest research indicates that the ability to search for relevant analytics and metrics that answer business questions is a high priority, and confirms that predictive analytics have come onto the radar screens of sales organizations. The research also suggests that sales organizations need to improve because it now takes almost one-third of them two weeks or longer to generate analytics.

Sales-related analytics is seen as a way to manage the sales pipeline and forecast process and to measure sales representative performance. But while more than half of organizations (60%) want to simplify sales analytics, the research finds that only 24% are planning to change the way they generate and apply analytics in the next 12 to 18 months.

"The sales organization is essential for generating revenue and addressing customer demands, which is why sales analytics and metrics are essentials for everyone who is directly or indirectly responsible for sales," noted Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research at Ventana Research in an announcement. "Just generating charts from spreadsheets and sending presentations around no longer works, since it does not deliver immediate access to the sales metrics needed to determine opportunity and resolve issues.”

Ventana’s benchmark research analyzed sales organizations around the world to assess the maturity and direction of their sales analytics efforts.

This story has been reprinted with permission from Information Management.

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