How and Why to Analyze Your SaaS Sales Data

Numbers, numbers, numbers.

Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

It can be super frustrating to try and stay on top of all of your SaaS sales data. Honestly, it’s overwhelming. In the sea of numbers and metrics, how can you make sure you’re paying attention to the ones that matter?

But then, without tracking those numbers, how can you know what you’re doing? How can you make sense of your progress and growth?

While many industries heavily rely on data and numbers to guide them, sales teams have a very specific relationship with their numbers. With quotas to reach and sales goals to forecast, it’s especially crucial to track all the data you can.

What is the goal of data for SaaS sales?

When you analyze your sales data, you aim to understand the performance of your sales team against predefined goals or KPIs. 

You can gain insights into the best-selling products or features, discover issues in certain locations or with specific sales reps, and inform sales forecasting and capacity planning. 

Plus, by analyzing what’s working and what’s not, you can better understand what makes customers purchase, why they drop off in the middle of the sales process, and how to improve your product and/or sales flow to increase conversion rates. 

Why analyzing SaaS sales data is important

If you don’t understand your sales data, any changes you make to your processes, resources, products, or services will be a stab in the dark. You need to analyze your numbers to make data-driven decisions. 

By properly analyzing your sales data, you can:

• Make decisions based on data, not guesswork.
  This means you’ll consistently lean into what works and away from what doesn’t. 
• Find your most profitable product or service.
  You can also learn the segment of customers that are the most profitable for your SaaS.
• Analyze seasonal or external forces in demand.
  This can help you prepare for future peaks and troughs.
• Understand what your customers like or dislike about your product.
  Double-down on what’s working and ditch anything that’s not adding real value.
• Locate potential gaps in your existing customers.
  Grow your business by finding an untapped market for your offering.
• Evaluate your team’s performance.
  This data will help with your sales capacity planning.

5 sales analysis methods you need to start using now

Do you have your calculator ready? 

Because we’re about to crunch some numbers.

As a SaaS company, it’s essential to understand the difference between the different analysis methods and choose the best one for your specific use case or performance insight. 

But, before we dive into the methods, let’s review some of the standard metrics you will need to understand to analyze your SaaS sales. 

We won’t cover these in-depth, as you can read about them in our sales metrics blog, but briefly, to use the methods below, you will need to understand the following terms:

• Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
• Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
• Customer Churn Rate
• Revenue churn rate
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
• Months to Recover CAC
• Lead Velocity Rate (LVR)

Here’s a rundown of the most common sales analysis methods:

1. Sales trend analysis

How have your sales changed over the last quarter? What about this past December compared to the December of last year?

Tracking your sales trends over short or long periods allows you to understand your product demand and helps you progress towards reaching your revenue KPIs. 

How to track it:

To conduct a sales trend analysis, use your CRM or invoicing software to gather all the sales records. Then compare the data month to month or year to year to gain a better understanding of the trends over time. 

You can also use that information to narrow down the trends by your products, regions, customers, channels, contracts, product type, contract type, and so on. 

Enter the data into Excel or Google sheets to calculate your trends over time. 

2. Sales performance analysis

How’s your team performing? Are your campaigns hitting the goals they set out to achieve?

Your sales performance analysis can help you track these important metrics. Compare the revenue generated by each sales rep, team, department, or campaign, to your business goals. 

How to track it:

To conduct a sales performance analysis, use your CRM to determine the revenue generated by each agent. 

Then enter the data into a spreadsheet and crunch the sales and revenue generated by team, department, and campaign.

3. Predictive sales analysis

How much can you expect to sell next holiday season?

Your predictive sales analysis can help you estimate future demand for your product (or lack thereof). SaaS companies should use their historical data to model future predictions for sales, identify opportunities for increasing revenue, and prepare for any potential risks. 

How to track it:

To conduct predictive sales analysis, you need to find your historical sales data in your CRM or pipeline software. It’s essential to ensure this data is clean and accurate before moving on to the analysis. 

While you may be able to gather all this data manually, it’s pretty complicated and most companies choose to use tools that enable AI and machine learning to analyze the data and make forecasts. 

4. Sales pipeline analysis

What’s it like to be a customer of your company? What’s your customers’ buying experience?

You can learn a lot about this by tracking your pipeline data. Gain insights into your customer’s journey from cold or inbound lead through the various stages to either a drop-off or a closed deal. 

Analyzing this can help you learn at what stage you are losing leads, how long the process takes, and how many touchpoints you need on average. 

You can then optimize your funnel and marketing collateral to ensure the leads are getting the right information at the right time, reduce drop-offs, increase speed to sale, and ultimately, improve conversion rates. 

How to track it:

The first step of your sales pipeline analysis is to set stages in your CRM’s pipeline that can be used by the entire team. Next, you need a set of guidelines to ensure that your reps are using the same metrics to determine that a lead should be moved to the next stage of your pipeline.

Finally, decide on a set of core metrics to analyze the pipeline. We recommend:

• New marketing qualified leads (MQLs) per week/month
• Conversion rates per pipeline stage
• Pipeline value per stage
• Overall pipeline value/sales cycle (to give you an idea of the daily value of your pipe)
• Sales rep performance 

5. Product sales analysis

What are your different offerings and are you making enough money on each? Which is your best seller? Are your prices high enough?

These are important questions and the best way to solve them is by analyzing your product sales data. 

You may have various SaaS products or different plans that customers can choose. You likely have an enterprise-level product or a stripped-back version for smaller businesses. But regardless of the products you have, it’s important to analyze the performance of each one, as well as the resources required to develop, maintain, and sell them. 

Once you start tracking this, you might uncover that one product sells well, but its profit is minimal due to higher maintenance or more demanding customer service. 

How to track it:

Use your invoicing software or CRM to determine the volume of sales per product by day, week, and month. 

Then, uncover the cost to deliver each product. For example, in the SaaS world, this could be the costs of development, onboarding, and customer service time. 

In a spreadsheet, analyze the profit and loss for each product, as well as the sales over time. This will help you find the profit per product and the speed of sales for each product.

Start gathering data from your product demos  

Sales demos are arguably the most important element of your sales process. The demo is where your prospect gets the chance to see your product for themselves and understand how it works and how it can solve their pain points.

But how can you track insights from this stage and optimize your experience?

Glad you asked. If you used an interactive product demo platform like Walnut, you can showcase how your SaaS business will add value to prospective customers effortlessly and effectively. And then, once the prospect clicked through the demo, you can track how they interacted with it to gain powerful insights that’ll help you convert more. 

Ready to start tracking and optimizing your sales demos? Book a meeting with us now by clicking that “Get Started” button on the top of the screen.