How to Conduct a Post-Holiday Sales Performance Analysis

How regularly should you perform a sales performance analysis? Once a quarter? Once a year? The truth is that there isn’t a universal answer to that question. But if your business sees a seasonal peak during the holiday season, doing an analysis immediately afterwards can be an excellent idea.

In this article, we’ll look at what a sales performance analysis is, as well as the benefits you’ll gain from running one. We’ll also set out a few practical steps to follow to make the process work for your company.

What is a sales performance analysis?

Experienced sales teams know that reaching a sales target is only half the battle. In order to make informed decisions about how best to drive future sales, it’s crucial to dig into the details of your sales team performance over a period of time.

Examining key sales metrics like sales revenue and revenue growth are vital, of course. But to be able to make good data-driven decisions, you need to put them into context. Carrying out regular sales data analysis is essential.

Comparing team and individual performance to set targets gives you a strong foundation, because it alerts you to what’s working and what isn’t. This can give you valuable insights into how to improve customer engagement, average conversion rates, and other essential metrics such as conversion times and the customer retention rate.

While this approach will yield actionable insights at any time, it’s perhaps even more valuable to focus on it during the time period directly following a peak holiday season.

After all, while the holiday sales season is in full swing, things are hectic. You need to concentrate your sales efforts 100% on closing those deals. But when the rush is over, your sales reps are likely to have a little more time to digest an analysis of how things went.

So, grasp the opportunity – because it’s very much worth doing. Here’s why.

Benefits of conducting a sales performance analysis

Examining and analyzing the actual sales performance of your team after the holiday period delivers a number of benefits. Here’s a quick overview of some of the biggest ones.

Improved understanding of market trends

Any business looking to grow its market share needs to develop an effective sales strategy that accounts for how customer expectations evolve. With ever changing trends, today’s best-selling products may very well become tomorrow’s has-beens. Gaining insights into changes in customer behaviors is crucial if you want to keep up with – and outpace – your competitors.

In a fast-moving world of digital innovation and quickly shifting market conditions, tracking new trends over time is key to building a solid foundation for excellent future sales performance. And the faster you can respond, the better. Companies that keep their eye on emerging trends by conducting regular sales performance analysis can be much nimbler than the competition, spotting new opportunities first.

Basis for better decision-making

Data-driven decision-making sits at the heart of any successful sales strategy. Using specialized sales analysis tools, it’s possible to get into the granular detail of your sales performance data to identify your team’s strengths and weaknesses. This will help you identify areas where further training would be beneficial, as well as assign people to tasks that they excel at.

It also allows you to fine-tune your sales strategy, so it’s well adapted for every stage of the sales pipeline. Doing this is one of the best ways to maximize sales in the future, because it helps you develop ways of engaging with individual customer segments more effectively. As a result, you’ll be able to make smarter decisions that help you connect with your customer base.

​​​​​​​Customer satisfaction boost

As a result of better decisions, you’ll likely see a significant uptick in customer satisfaction. But what are you doing that really works - and is there anything that could still be better? Regular sales analysis helps you discern sales patterns and shifts in customer behavior that allow you to get a firm grasp on what it is your customers actually want.

So don’t forget to incorporate customer feedback into the mix. Increased customer satisfaction scores are a strong indicator you’re meeting that demand. In addition, you’ll be able to spot opportunities for cross-selling and upselling. Over time, this can have a huge positive impact on average customer lifetime value - which leads neatly on to the final entry on this list.
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Increased profits

In the end, business growth comes down to one thing: increasing your profits. The kind of data-driven approach to team performance you take when you carry out comprehensive analysis forms the bedrock upon which your company will grow.

When you have the right data, you can develop more accurate sales forecasts and identify fresh sales opportunities. With all the information they need at their fingertips, your sales managers and reps will be empowered to perform to the very best of their ability. All of which leads to a boost in profits over time.

Crucial metrics to monitor when analyzing sales performance

So, which are the key metrics to track when doing a sales performance analysis? Well, there’s not one single answer to that, since a lot will depend on your company’s business goals. That said, here are a few metrics that are commonly included in this kind of sales analysis:

• Sales revenue: This bottom-line figure should be your starting point. You’re probably already measuring this on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. But in the immediate aftermath of the holiday season, it’s worth doing a year-on-year comparison as well. That’s because the seasonal effects of the holiday can obscure underlying trends across the year, so comparing performance to the previous holiday season gives you a more meaningful like-for-like picture.
• To ensure you maximize sales revenues, use the best payment processor for small business transactions. You can’t possibly give your sales revenues a boost if you don’t make it easy for customers to pay you in the first place. 
• Average deal size: Average deal sizes can vary widely depending on what kind of product or service you sell, as well as being influenced by external factors such as changes in the economic environment. Nevertheless, comparing your sales team’s average deal sizes over time will give you a useful indicator of how well your team is performing.
• Average sales cycle length: Again, sales cycles vary a lot. Fast-moving goods in the B2C sector tend to have short sales cycles, whereas something like top-end enterprise software can have a sales cycle measured in months. Like-for-like comparison is key. If the average sales cycle length is drifting upward, that’s a sign your team may need further training and support.
• Conversion rate: This is a key sales metric to track because it’s directly related to how effectively your sales team’s performance is developing. With that in mind, what matters here is how it changes over time. There’s a natural ceiling to conversion rates, and it’s crucial to determine what a good rate is in your field before comparing yourself to it.
• Customer acquisition cost: Maximizing sales revenue is one thing, but you need to keep an eye on the cost side too. Make sure your marketing efforts are cost-effective by including your average customer acquisition cost in the mix.

How to conduct a sales performance analysis – step by step

That’s the theory – so now, let’s look at how you do it in practice. Here are the main four steps to carry out a post-holiday sales performance analysis.

Select key metrics to track

Choose a few key metrics to focus on. You don’t need to monitor absolutely everything; indeed, if you do, you run the risk of information overload getting in the way of gaining valuable insights.

Isolate and monitor the sales metrics that are most relevant to your business goals. For instance, if your main goal is to catch up with a dominant competitor, then you might decide to monitor market share as well as the metrics already listed above.

Collect and organize data

Draw your data from every available source. This might mean a customer data platform (CDP) or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as Salesforce. As well as CDP and CRM systems, you can gain a lot of useful contextual data from qualitative sources such as customer feedback surveys.

Then, collect all your data in one place for analysis. Having a single source of truth avoids data silos and inaccurate observations caused by missing data. You can use specialized sales tools for this so that it’s easier to keep your reporting well organized.

Carry out data analysis

The next step is analysis. This goes beyond the bare bones of the sales figures themselves and into the “why?” underpinning them. For instance, the data might show you have a particular uptick in sales in the first week of the school year. That’s great - but understanding why will help you grow from it. Did you send out a particular email campaign that’s drawing people in? Perhaps one of your products went viral on TikTok and it’s the latest fashion item. It’s only by seeing the reasoning behind the numbers that you can see what works (or doesn’t).
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Put insights into practice

It’s crucial to come up with a concrete action plan after you’ve conducted your analysis. For example, let’s suppose during the hectic holiday period you were using a system with event streaming architecture to track customer behavior on your website using real-time data.

During the post-hoc analysis phase, you might want to look at how effectively your sales teams used that data in the moment to drive conversions. Are there any lessons you can learn that could be applied to future busy periods? Make a detailed plan for your team to refer to next time, and provide training in advance to capitalize on your successes.

Final takeaway

In the aftermath of a busy sales period like the holiday season, studying your sales team’s performance data is even more important than ever. It’s the perfect opportunity to find out what worked and what didn’t – and to tweak your sales strategy so you see even better results next time.

As long as you take a methodical approach, you’ll be able to learn a lot. As a result, your team will be in a much better position to engage with customers, drive conversions, and hit or exceed even the most challenging of sales targets. Happy holidays!