Revenue growth is a continuous process. There is no shortcut to reaching this business goal, but what if there is a way to forecast sales and improve the overall revenue performance? Would you take it?
Business analytics is a vast umbrella term to describe the scientific process of analyzing data that drives the decision-making process in any business.
This article will focus on revenue analytics as the key driver in forecasting sales revenue and predicting future business trends, its tools, and different revenue analytics examples.
What is Revenue Analysis
Before diving into different revenue analytics examples, let us know what a revenue analysis is.
When talking about revenue, you automatically think about income, profit, sales, or money. All of those refer to revenue and from that alone, we can say that a revenue analysis process is highly-detailed scrutiny of everything about a revenue.
A report is usually derived wherein all data from where it comes from, why a sale happened, what makes customers buy, and other important information is contained.
For a business to flourish, it is a must to keep all of the financials well-documented. This includes the costs of sales and the expenses involved in running the business.
You need to mind the production costs, overhead, and other expenditures. This is important since you cannot compute the total revenue without subtracting those.
But knowing the numbers is just one part of the whole revenue analytics process. Identifying the gross margin may give you an idea of how well the business is doing, but it does not give you a clear picture of your revenue.
Revenue analysis is a thorough study of all sectors of the business. It draws out information about customer behaviors, current trends, price changes, and other factors that may affect how you gain profit.
It is a multi-faceted journey that involves recording data, research, and proper documentation that are vital in having relevant and highly-valuable reports.
Revenue Analytics Examples
As earlier mentioned, revenue analytics is multi-faceted and does not only study the revenue per se. Here are the four types of revenue analysis and some revenue analytics examples to enlighten you:
1. Sales revenue analysis.
This process analyzes the total revenue generated across different periods, products, and customers. Its formula is: Revenue=Number of units sold x Average price of each item.
The document that summarizes all your sales and the revenue generated is a sales revenue report plotted in a time-series graph. This is usually time-consuming, but some revenue analytics tools can create this report in seconds.
2. Customer revenue analysis.
Another way to understand where revenue comes from is by making a customer revenue analysis. The revenue generated is broken down into categories whenever a customer purchases.
The data generated from it on the customer profile: demographics, location, time and date of purchase, products that they like, etc.
It may sound like a complicated step, but doing so will give you an insight into customer preferences, peak seasons, price point ideals, and much more.
3. Product revenue analysis.
Regarding product revenue analysis, you focus on how products and services perform and try to see which products or services are the top performers. This is done using the Pareto principle, wherein the top 20% of products comprising 80% of the sales are considered performers.
4. Revenue trend analysis.
This type determines how well the revenue goes over a certain period by analyzing the fluctuations in sales. For example, the food and entertainment industries usually peak during the weekends when people get off work. Another example is when some products are only sellable during specific seasons or sales periods.
Benefits of Revenue Analysis
After knowing about different revenue analytics examples, you might ask yourself, “Is it worth all the hard work?” Well, the most straightforward answer is “YES!” definitely. Here are the reasons why:
1. It guides in making decisions. Revenue analytics give you valuable insights that will be crucial in making well-informed decisions. Your goal is always to decide from a position of strength. This is only possible if you have detailed reports about the favorable conditions for your business growth.
The reports from various revenue analytics examples will guide you when planning for future productions, marketing campaigns, and product innovations. It will also help you decide what you can do to improve poor-performing campaigns or products.
2. It helps determine business profitability. Business owners must see if the business is thriving or not. You can calculate your products’ financials and value using the revenue analytics examples.
You can see whether you are making a profit once you take down the expenses from your total sales. Of course, you aim to make a profit, so the reports will determine if your efforts paid off.
3. It helps you pave the future of your business. Detailed reports from revenue analysis can help you create sound projections for the future. Predicting what is in store for your business is difficult, but having valuable insights may change its course.
Knowing the top-performing products, for example, gives you an idea of where to focus your mind for innovations. You can plan your strategies based on customer preferences and sales patterns.
4. It shows where it is wise to invest. The beauty of revenue analysis is that it gives you a clear picture of the business performance. You can see if the business is steadily growing or otherwise.
Some products may cost a lot in production but never sell. Aside from monetary investment, you also save on effort and other resources if you know which products or services are underperforming and must be reviewed for discontinuation.
How to Do It?
Across the different revenue analytics examples, you can see one thing in common among them. They all need data to work. You must prepare to deal with plenty of data when doing revenue analysis.
1. Data Collection
The first step in any analysis is gathering the data you need. This means collecting relevant information about the customers, product sales, unit prices, different product lines, time of purchase, branch responsible for the sales, expenses, and all other related data.
2. Choose a Revenue Analysis Tool/Software
As you can observe, much work is needed when doing revenue analytics. The data gathering alone will take ages, especially if you do it manually over Excel and other similar applications.
While simple tools are readily available and can help, they are insufficient to handle data from the different revenue analytics examples. The good thing is that modern marketers have found a way to lighten the load and make innovations to make the process as seamless as possible.
Some tools are specifically made to collect and analyze business data. Some have features that can be integrated with other apps. Most of the time, using the right tools for your business will make the process simpler, faster, and more efficient.
3. Upload Data and Start with Your Analysis
Usually, the tools you need for revenue analytics will ask you to upload the required data. It can be from your database or other software. Either way, it can only start to do its job when it has the data to analyze.
Is it Difficult to Do Revenue Analytics?
At first glance, you may think it requires a lot of effort, money, time, and other resources. In reality, and with the best revenue analytics tools, the process is simple and will require minimal effort on your end.
How so, if you may ask. The trick here is to find the most suitable revenue analytics software that fits your business. These tools are not made the same. Some will fit big corporations, while others are perfect for small-scale companies.
The idea here is to look at revenue analytics to be universal but consider choosing applications that will cater to your current needs. You do not need to invest in feature-packed software unless you can use all its features.
These modern tools are often built with AI technology these days. Take advantage of this and have something that will gather and analyze data simultaneously.
You may also want to check if it integrates with your existing marketing software. This way, data collection will be quick, and errors or duplications will be avoided.
Conclusion
Knowing revenue analytics examples is crucial because it is one way to motivate you to start doing it for your business. Plenty of revenue analytics tools can aid you in doing it. With a little effort on your end, these tools will do all the work needed to ensure that you are not deviating from your business goals.
It is incredibly challenging to kickstart business analytics, but you need to do it to stay competitive. Take comfort in knowing there are ways to improve business processes, keep customers happy, and boost revenue. Revenue analytics is probably the simplest and most accessible method to reach these goals.