Gold in data

from Think Tank - Think Water - April 2021

Time and money saving valve solutions

How analysing your sales data from previous years can tell you about your customers and business.

Buried in your business system is a large amount of information about your customers. Not only is this information useful to better understand when and how much your customers buy from you, but also their potential share of wallet and collectively your market share within your main service area. Once you extract this information and do some basic analysis it can give you some great insights into your customers. • Identify new customers and then workout how effective your marketing spend is. • Compare how existing customers are purchasing year on year. • Identify key markets you operate in- intuitively you know this-

however there may also be other markets you’re missing out on that may not be obvious. • Compare your data with external data (ABS and other data sources) to work out market share.

This information is also valuable to guide you on strategic decisions such as marketing spend, target markets and opening up new opportunities such as new product lines.

How do I extract this information?

The simplest way to do this is to export top line sales history by customer for each year into an Excel spreadsheet. Most systems export as a CSV file – which is easily handled in Excel. Once this data is downloaded it can then be cleaned up and sorted – if this is a step too far then we can assist. Once the data is cleaned you can then allocate a market segment to each customer such as horticulture, broadacre, cash/pos, local government, schools, residential, cattle, sheep, dairy, lifestyle, basically what ever fits your business and location.

To then do further work on the data councils, ABS, Stats NZ or other sources will have localised information on farm /enterprise numbers this can give you a good picture of your local area.