Analytics: Sales Representative Profitability 3

This week I wrote an analytics series on sales representative profitability. It is about the analysis and types of insight you get from measuring the profitability of your salesforce. Just from one analytic there can be several insights. It is about understanding what the data says and connecting it to the explanation of a business challenge.  Devoting one more post on the topic:

Salesforce profitability can often be described as an advanced sales analytic because it enables more complex analysis such as sales forecasting, predicting churn and sales campaign analysis.  

In order to measure salesforce profitability, you must be able to merge three types of business data over time.  

1. Sales Representative Information
1. Name
2. Tenure
2. Sales Data
1. Sales
2. Sales Type (Product/Service/Deal Type/Quantity )
3. Volume of sales by sales type
3. Financial Data
1. Revenue
2. Cost of Sales
3. Cost of Goods Sold
4. Profit over time

This type of analysis requires more than a regular query of a database or the building of a standard report to influence strategy. To do the analysis you many have to extract or download the data from your data warehouse or applications.  MS Excel or other business intelligence software will then have to used to carry out the analysis.