Identify Key Metrics for Success
Tracking sales performance is a key element of any retail business. Metrics help identify consumer trends, optimize strategies, and boost revenue. They also empower individual salespeople to be more effective. However, it’s not just any performance tracking that will do. According to Forbes Business Council members, business metrics like sales, customer retention, and turnover provide valuable insights into a company’s state. It’s crucial to collect and utilize the right data correctly.
To best identify the most impactful ways to track your sales metrics, the first step is to identify the most relevant set of key performance indicators, or KPIs. As one Shopify article summarizes, for any sales-focused organization, these can include things like sales conversion rates, average order size, customer retention rate, product affinity, and customer acquisition cost, among many, many others. And while all of these may be tangentially related to any given business, it’s important to prioritize those that most directly affect your business, and funnel inwards from there.
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For example, as an auto dealership, which generally has both an online or telephonic and in-person touchpoint during each sales relationship—remember, omnichannel retail is key here!—things like revenue per visitor may be less relevant (since a consumer is unlikely to complete a purchase on the website alone), whereas a retailer’s share of the total market, customer retention rate over years, and sales by time period are all impactful and important numbers to know and understand.
Revenue per employee is another KPI that is particularly relevant within the industry. It’s an effective way to understand how to nurture a dealership’s best and strongest sales people, and allow them to influence training and sales strategy development in the way proven most helpful in that particular dealership’s market. It also allows managers to reward success based on quantitative analysis, rather than esoteric or personal biases.
And a direct offshoot of RPE, then, is ROI, or return on investment. In this case, a large part of the investment that auto dealers make is in the training of their sales staff—and the return, therefore, should be in sales numbers. Put more bluntly, one Forbes Business Council member explains this as the very crux of any retail business: “If you are not calculating your return on dollars spent, then you’re not running a business, you’re running a nonprofit.“
When used properly, sales performance metrics can be analyzed and tracked to maximize profits, minimize spend, and encourage healthy sales habits—not to mention developing a pipeline to keep these trends going. With the right technology, like CallRevu’s call data analysis, this process can become as seamless as the sales interactions themselves, empowering sales managers and training staff to embed these successful habits directly into the regular practices of any retail business.
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