Welcome to the Metric of the Week. This week we’ll be discussing ‘Total Sales.’
What is the metric?
Total Sales is the amount of sales your company generates.
Why should you care?
Total Sales indicates how well your company is performing. In addition to assessing overall says by day, week and month, look at sales by other factors such as by geography, by product/service, by reseller/vendor/affiliate, etc.
What does it look like?
Below is a sample Total Sales by Day chart.
You should also view sales over different time periods, such as:
- Sales by week
- Sales by month
- Sales by quarter
- Sales by year
And finally, you should assess sales using different dimensions, such as:
- Sales by product or service
- Sales by region
- Sales by distributor or sales rep
- Sales by customer type
How can you positively effect this metric?
There are hundreds of ways to improve your sales, such as by generating more leads, improving your value proposition, modifying your pricing, better training sales staff, etc.
Importantly, there are often some quick improvements you can make just by reviewing your sales metrics charts for anomalies. For example, we noticed that one of our clients had low sales every Monday. We then noticed that their AdWords spend was low on Mondays.
As it turns out, their old advertising firm had lowered their ad bids on Mondays. Upon uncovering this, they removed that restraint, and Monday’s and overall sales increased considerably.
