Digging into your sales data analysis can make or break your company. You need to understand what you are looking at, and why the numbers available are so significant.
If you can see the importance of the data, you can make improvements to your company and grow. Every business owner wants to see their company get larger and more successful, so why wouldn’t you want to thoroughly examine this data?
We are going to dive in and look at five methods to help examine sales analysis data, and how it is going to benefit you.
Size Matters
If you are looking at a sample of your sales data, you may start jumping to conclusions. This could damage your business in significant ways. You may believe that you need to order more or less of a certain product, and so forth.
Instead of making bad choices, you can do a deep sales data analysis while keeping in mind the size of the customer base you are looking at. Are you examining 100 people? Half your customers? All of them? These are important questions.
The sooner you take the size of your analysis into consideration, the better off you are.
Note Your Forecasts
A forecast is a prediction for the business you are going to do in the future. For example, if you work in a restaurant you may forecast for sales to be the same that they were on the same day the year before.
You may also notice trends such as more sales on Thursday than Friday. You need to make your forecasts based on tangible evidence. Make sure that you are not just “guessing,” and instead, using facts as a basis for your decision.
Keep Records
If you want to make educated guesses based on facts, as previously mentioned, you need to keep records. While doing a sales data analysis, keep records of significant bits of information.
It may be helpful if you make an excel page with all the essential data for the day. You may want to note the total sales, the expected sales, the most popular selling item, and so forth. These records will help you “excel” in the future.
Think About Expanding
As you are working on your sales data analysis, you may notice trends with your customers. This is a great opportunity to figure out how you can expand your customer base.
Ask yourself, what kind of people are not buying my product, and what can I do to convert them? Sales data is a great tool for figuring out your customer base and what you need to do to expand in an effective and productive way.
Tweak Price Trends
Another interesting method you should consider is adjusting your prices on a set basis. You may want to lower the price of a product and check the sales for the product around a similar time in similar conditions.
Once you have done this, you can see if the amount of money you gain is worth a slight price drop. For example, if you sell something for 5 dollars that costs 2 dollars for you, and you sell 2 a day that’s 6 dollar profit. However, if you sell the same item for 4 dollars and sell 6, you have made $12 and doubled your profit by lowering the price.
