| Experts Corner |  CRM investment is wasted if the intelligence it delivers fails to influence despatched communications. How can businesses ensure that money spent on CRM analytics actually begins to benefit the messages that are delivered to customers and prospects?
David Jefferies, Marketing Director, Pitney Bowes
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Ammunition for the Troops
Simon Boundy, Marketing Manager, Vecta Software
 Companies generate huge amounts of data during their day-to-day operations including orders, invoices, point-of-sale transactions, inventory, and customer and supplier information. There is considerable value in all of that data: it can help companies respond more quickly to internal and external events; make better business decisions and gain a sustainable competitive advantage by selling the right products, to the right customer, at the right price.
Software designed to interrogate data and derive meaningful insights has existed since the development of commercial computing in the 1960s but traditionally these tools have been difficult and inflexible to use; expensive and time-consuming to implement; and relied on IT departments to maintain. Furthermore, access to the data has typically been restricted to executives and business analysts rather than the people who are in a position to have the most immediate impact on the bottom line — the sales team.
Paper trail
In the past sales executives have had to rely on manual analysis of large paper print-outs extracted from complex transactional sales systems in order to monitor their customers’ buying patterns and try to identify sales opportunities. This is not very practical if your sales team is out on the road and a waste of valuable time if they are supposed to be hitting the phones. However, as companies have started to realise the intrinsic value of such information, access to operational data is being rolled out to more and more users, both inside and outside the business.
This has required a new class of analytical business software known as ‘sales intelligence’, which is easier to use, faster to implement and targeted specifically at the sales function.
Sales intelligence is critical to both internal and external sales people. Companies deploy a variety of tools and technologies to help these different types of sales people but fundamentally the sales process for both starts with understanding the customer.
External sales people are typically road warriors without access to the historical sales information that is locked away in back-office systems. At best they have paper reports in their briefcase that are inches thick, out of date and take hours to review without providing them with the real insight they require.
Sales intelligence solutions provide them with access to information they’ve never had before: sales history information that is relevant to them and their customers is proactively delivered to their laptops or pocket PCs, allowing them to research their customers before every call whether they are sitting in the customer’s car park or having lunch at the service station For many sales people, this sort of access to this type of information is revolutionary.
Not only is this data delivered direct to the sales person: it is done so in a format that is easy to understand and that highlights sales issues or opportunities. To make external sales people more effective and stay one step ahead of the competition, companies must adopt sales intelligence solutions that mobilise data and deliver critical sales information to the point of sale.
Sales assistant
The benefits of sales intelligence, however, are equally relevant to internal telesales people who spend their days calling customers for orders. There is an increasing trend for companies to get people off the road and service customers from the office to minimise the cost of sale. However, customers receive dozens of calls per day from companies trying to sell them products or services and it's getting increasingly difficult to get their time or attention on the phone.
The challenge for companies who rely wholly or in part on a telesales operation is how to maintain relationships and differentiate yourselves from your competitors over the phone. Sales intelligence solutions allow telesales teams to understand their customers intimately and make more informed calls.
The software arms the sales person with the key information that will enable them to increase the value of a sale by suggesting relevant or alternative products and to investigate and address any slowdown or drift in spend.
Surprisingly, purchasing managers often have poor access to information about what they are buying and appreciate vendors who understand their buying patterns and suggest related products or relevant promotions. This consultative and proactive approach to selling develops stronger customer relationships and larger order sizes.
Sales intelligence is particularly appropriate for markets characterised by high volumes of sales, large numbers of customers and extensive product catalogues where identifying trends and performing sales analyses is typically seen as difficult or almost impossible with other technologies.
Companies that have an established customer base with regular repeat orders, or which operate in highly competitive markets with few product, service or pricing differentiators can also derive significant business benefits from sales intelligence.
Sales intelligence solutions enable sales people of all types, whether they’re on the road or on the end of the phone, to be prepared to sell more on every call. Ultimately companies that deploy sales intelligence enjoy improved gross margins, increased sales and higher levels of customer satisfaction. Can you afford not to adopt sales intelligence?
| Equipped with VECTA sales intelligence software, companies gain an insight into their customers’ buying patterns and can define effective sales strategies. This valuable information helps them to sell more intelligently, improving revenue and margin through increased average order size and increased order volume.
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