Numbers don’t lie! But they don’t always tell the full story, either. Let’s look at a few different ways to dissect sales data in order to try to get a (more) complete picture.
Our team tends to approach sales analyses by looking at these data from a few different angles and then triangulate to draw out some conclusions. Examples of a few of those angles might include:
Performance by flower
Performance by color
Performance by season
Performance by category
We start with this approach because examining only one of the above – taking a narrower lens – might lead to blind spots in the data, and ultimately less-informed decisions.
Example: If you were to look only at performance by flower, you might see that dahlias were your top-selling crop. This might lead you to plant more dahlias… but if you were to consider your sales by flower, and then look at your sales by color, you might see that green was your number two selling color – that might suggest an opportunity in foliage that you may have missed had you only looked at top-selling genera or cultivars.
From there, we’d slice it a bit further; we would look at all of these analyses in a few different ways to try to get a fuller picture:
1. Performance by absolute rankings
These can help give you a sense of the highest-demand products, colors, etc.
Example: take a look at your own flower analytics in your Rooted account!
2. Performance as a percentage of total sales
This can help you tell how important those rankings are.
Example: If your top ten flowers only represent 15% of sales, then your conclusions will likely be different than if those same ten flowers represented 70% of all sales.
3. Performance considering Year-Over-Year (YOY) growth
This is key in trying to identify trends or growth opportunities as you’re looking at the year ahead.
Example: If your sales doubled from one year to the next, but a particular item or color went up by 5x, then we would say that item/color outperformed or outpaced, other segments or products. Similarly, if your sales doubled from one year to the next but one crop only increased slightly, then we would consider that to be underperforming. Note: if you experienced crop failures or diminished inventory, that can also drive apparent underperformance.
Next, we encourage you to look at your own individual sales analytics on Rooted and compare your data to the broader trends. Where do your sales look similar? Where are there differences, or gaps? Are there opportunities that you may be missing that seem to be taking off in other parts of the country? Read our Year in Review post for more on this.
Whether you are outperforming or underperforming on any of these metrics or lists, the next step is always to ask “why?” Why is this doing well for me? Why is this not selling? We always like to reflect on our own, and then approach some of our trusted buyers to have an open discussion in the off-season to collect feedback.
A few takeaways:
Assess your own sales! Use the methods above to start sifting through your data.
Consider creating a year-end buyer survey. There are a number of free and low-cost tools for administering these, including Survey Monkey, Qualtrics, Jotform, Google Forms, and others. A few questions you might ask your buyers: product they liked and didn’t like (and why!), what they wish they had more of, what color palettes they may be working with in the season ahead, etc.
Looking for more data and analytics? Upgrade to Rooted Farmers Pro: which includes robust analytics, buyer segmentation, pricing transparency and more.