Achieve budgeted sales
Time and again, you find it's late in the month and it's apparent from the sales team that there will be a problem hitting the numbers. You scramble to assess both the magnitude and the source of the variance, and both you and the sales team pose dozens of pressing questions in a last-minute charge to recover. In this climate, most organisations face the following problems:
- Answering the pressing questions requires sales rep and management time, shifting the focus away from productive sales activities. The valuable sales time lost serves to further compound the problem.
- Shortcomings are revealed too late in the sales cycle to stimulate sales and recover the month.
Comprehending and acting upon accurate information early is what's key to preempting unpleasant month-end surprises. Modern sales organisations employ BI tools, which allow them access to a continuous feed of valuable company information. In these organisations, managers and sales reps are able to, at any point in time, quickly grasp the big picture, then instantly drill down to identify particular areas of concern, such as individual products, accounts, and/or sales regions or representatives. Armed with this sort of intelligence, you can design and implement surgical "microplans" to address each small problem area as it is uncovered. The result? Making small corrections enable you to stay the course and make your month.
Increase the proportion of high-value customers in your customer mix
Your highest-value customers are dependable and low-maintenance. Most importantly, month after month, they contribute a hefty volume of high-margin sales. It makes sense to proactively seek prospective customers that have similar attributes and to focus your customer acquisition efforts on adding them to the fold. But many organizations have the following obstacles to overcome to achieve this sales initiative:
- Often, organisations do not have the relevant customer information on which to build an accurate profile of their most-valued customers, which prevents any attempt to target similar prospects.
- Even if an organisation does have the critical customer information, it's often not ordered in any useful manner. To truly reap the rewards of this information, customer information must be organised by geography, industry, volume of business, number of different products purchased, or any number of other pertinent characteristics to be truly useful in targeting high-value potential customers.
With a little imagination and a great information system, you can begin by implementing simple measures to enable you to rank your current customers according to their relative value to your organisation. Initially, try ranking them by profit contribution alone, then you can add more sophisticated factors later, if you choose (timely payment, returns, complaints, etc.).
Once you've arranged customers from high to low value, you can do two powerful things right off the bat. First, you can better target your customer-acquisition initiatives by focusing your customer-acquisition efforts around the attributes common to high-value customers. Second, you can begin to engineer your overall customer mix by targeting high-value replacements for low-value customers.
Conclusion
The rewards of having the right information organised in a useful manner are many to the organisations that make the effort to attain these sales and marketing goals. Most organisations either have or can get the necessary data (garden-variety transactional type), but implementing the right BI tools can allow organisations to utilize that data in new and more efficient ways. The current crop of BI tools is both affordable and straightforward to implement (although it's always advisable to spend some time with a BI specialist who has experience with BI solutions), and many organisations realise a payback in just a few months' time.
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