Annual sales constitute a crucial metric for every organization – a cornerstone for your business’s profitability and growth. Distribution companies are not an exception.
You make money when other businesses purchase your products. But in this digital age of disruption, market trends shift rapidly – the demand and supply patterns have become more volatile. So you must track business performance – the annual sales metric being your top priority. It extensively helps you maximize revenue recognition and improve your strategic planning and decision-making.
This article is all about annual sales and how can distribution companies make use of this metric to achieve their business goals. Let’s jump in.
Annual sales (also called annual sales revenue) metric refers to the total revenue that your distribution company generates over one financial year. You can segment your sales into gross revenue and net revenue. The first indicates the total amount that your organization makes from the sale of goods and services, however, it does not reflect the profit margin. The second refers to the net amount of sales subtracting expenses i.e. how much you have made from the sales. It is also known as the return on sales ratio.
To calculate the annual sales, determine the accurate revenue generated from sales transactions in one fiscal year.
Annual sales = Quantity sold x Price Per Unit.
Jot down all the sources of revenue – sales transactions, rentals, investments, royalties, and so on.
Annual Revenue = Sales + Other sources of income.
Customer retention is a lot more lucrative than customer acquisition. Therefore, generating sales and revenue from existing customers is more feasible. Now, identifying opportunities at the right time is a bit of a task here. However, when you perform a Gap Analysis with the right tools in place, you can seamlessly identify sales opportunities.
By “the right tools” I meant Zoho One. It is a powerhouse platform that houses 40+ applications. It offers you Zoho Analytics through which you can monitor your customers’ buying patterns and track the products they are buying and the complementary products that they aren’t. For example, if run a paper company and you sell complementary paper products like clips, pens, etc, you would try to expand your revenue by selling these products to your distributors.
With this data, you can easily recognize the gaps to open and assign tasks for upselling or cross-selling to your sales reps. Guide them to make feasible offers to your distributors so that they can add value to your business in the long run. Adding value to your customer lifecycle plays a massive role in organically boosting annual sales.
If you don’t have an accurate financial analysis already, there’s no way you can increase your annual sales. Before starting, you must assess key metrics that comply with overall financial health. You can extract valuable insights from an in-depth analysis of these metrics to determine the market tides.
Let’s suppose, you are currently facing an unidentified roadblock to increase your sales because of the increased competition. Zoho Analytics helps you pinpoint exactly where your products are falling short.
Scenario II: Let’s say that you have a USP (Unique Selling Point) that secures your competitive edge or a niche market with growth potential that you can target. You must discover all these gaps in between to take your business to its best state.
A thorough analysis of your finances helps you realize the current stature of your business – whether the sales are increasing or decreasing. Based on this data, you can adjust your price points, and implement new strategies, or enunciate new features that can address end customers.
Another aspect of a successful company is its accurate budgeting and forecasting. If you remain oblivious to your current annual sales data, chances are less likely that you’ll be able to project accurate budgets and forecasts.
When you head a business, you eventually become aware of the seasonal trends, and market demand. Keeping a close eye on your distributors’ behavior will help you forecast your future growth. Here a quality CRM software widely helps you out. CRM softwares like Zoho CRM are adept in documenting and centralizing data. You can implement this software to retrieve and browse through the collected data, identify consistent trends, and forecast sales in the coming year.
A business is made when all the entities of an organization work and collaborate as a team. For distribution businesses, marketing is just as important as sales. You must measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Here too, the annual sales metric can help as it gives you an acute understanding of the ROI for the hundreds of dollars invested.
Strategize as per the math – which sales and marketing channels have generated the most sales, which products have consistent sales, which niche audience is the most profitable for your business, and so on.
Needless to say, inventory management is a crucial part of distribution businesses. With annual sales data in hand, you can forecast product demand accurately. For example, let’s say you manufacture a particular product with high demand during particular months. You can analyze the market highs and lows, project the demand, and predict the incoming sales volume. You can optimize inventory turnover by adjusting stock levels or preventing overstock or running out of stock, saving on costs.
The annual sales metric is also a key to evaluating your team’s performance. Zoho Analytics offers you comprehensive reports and dashboards that help you measure the ROI of your sales reps, identify the top performers, recognize achievements, and design incentive programs for motivation. You get a clear picture of your sales reps’ performance and discover a significant performance gap so that you can conduct performance reviews and educational sessions to train the underperforming employees. This in turn can help you shape up your team as per their performance by strategically structuring them to drive maximum annual sales.
You’re living in the digital age. It demands you to be comfortable with data insights and make data-driven decisions. The annual sales metric too, is an indispensable part of data that helps you analyze the financial performance of your company. With this metric in your hand, you can optimize business operations and set realistic benchmarks for more growth and success.
While data and analytics lie at the core of every business, there are other major areas of operations too. When you get backed up with Zoho One, you get a parent console of 40+ applications from where you can choose your ideal apps and advance your business to new heights.
Schedule a free 90-minute no-obligation consultation with our experts right away!