The holiday season is a busy time of year for SMBs, and research shows that half of all SMBs make 25% of their annual revenue during the holidays.
But without proper sales analysis and tracking, it’s difficult to know whether you’re hitting annual targets, seeing measurable growth, and working towards your strategic goals.
In this post, we’ll show you how to analyze your holiday sales numbers and trends so you can find the best opportunities to optimize your software, promote the right services, and set achievable goals for the coming year.
1. Gather Your Sales Data
Pull your sales reports from the holiday period and compile your data by month, week, day, and product to get specific data on different items and sales periods.
Don’t just look at revenue here; gather data on the number of orders, units sold, regions sold, etc.
The more data you can pull here, the easier and more valuable your analysis will be.
Include key stakeholders in this stage of the process. Sales and marketing team managers should have key insights into your sales numbers and should have input into obvious trends or anomalies in your data.
2. Compare Results to Your Goals and Prior Years
First, look at your stats from the same period in the last three years; how do the numbers compare? Ideally, you’ll see growth year-on-year – the average annual growth rate for SMBs is between 10% and 25%, but that depends on the industry, company size, economy, and other factors.
You should have made predictions for your holiday sales, so how do your real figures stack up? Did you meet your revenue and unit sale goals? If not, can you see any major reasons why?
While comparing your results, highlight your best and worst-performing periods and your best and worst-performing products/categories – these will be valuable data points for your marketing strategy moving forward.
3. Dive into KPI Trends
KPIs are essential for trend analysis because they allow you to monitor and evaluate your holiday performance over consecutive years. You can also compare your progress with industry benchmarks and easily identify opportunities for improvement.
A deep KPI analysis also helps you communicate your holiday season results to stakeholders, allowing you to better align resources and your technology roadmap for the following year.
When you’re analyzing your KPIs for this holiday season, check whether you’ve exceeded industry standards and your predictions for the year. It’s also important to look for anomalies or unexpected patterns that you can use in your marketing forecasts.
4. Isolate External Factors
It’s almost impossible to pinpoint holiday sales success or failure on a singular factor. However, there are external factors that can have a significant impact on your numbers.
For example, did you run a holiday promotion that led to a spike in sales? Or perhaps there was abnormally bad weather that hurt foot traffic?
Don’t forget to account for economic and industry conditions that could skew your data from previous years. COVID-19 was a rare anomaly that drastically impacted many SMBs and meant yearly trends were skewed for several years.
5. Takeaways for Future Planning
Once you have mapped out your metrics, trends, and key data points, you can summarize the insights and lessons learned to present to stakeholders. Create graphs for visual aids and focus on positive and negative takeaways to give a full picture.
It’s important to emphasize your wins, but you should also bring any failures or challenges to light and create improvement plans. Note any trends you should replicate next holiday season, and carefully plan any changes you want to make to improve your marketing or processes.
This review period will likely highlight limitations in software and processes that you now have time to adjust and improve for next season.
Finally, establish new goals based on the data review ready for next season. Make sure they’re achievable and based on real-life metrics, but consider the improvements and successes you plan to implement when forecasting.
Analyze and Optimize
Analyzing holiday sales data is critical to achieving sustainable growth. Without insights into your numbers, there’s no way of knowing if you hit your goals or need to restrategize.
Take the time this New Year to analyze your sales numbers, celebrate your wins, and plan any needed improvements to smash your goals for next year.
Need Help Evaluating
your Current Inventory Systems?
Visit our directory of software consultants in the StackPlan Consultant Directory. Vetted consultants are ready to support your business needs.
