Sales Team Issue #1 - Uncovering Viable leads –  

                                                                                                             

Across multiple industries over several decades, sales team members have voiced concerns to me over finding closeable opportunities. This becomes magnified during times of economic contraction. During the years following the mortgage driven recession of 2008, I met numerous people who had been totally pushed out of their previous fields because the market had evaporated. Or as in the case of a commodity like crude oil and the associated industries, supply and demand can cause wild gyrations in price. Consequently, viable customers can literally disappear overnight.

Despite all your valiant efforts, remember you do not control the market. Don’t allow marketplace fluctuations to affect your positive attitude and sales efforts.

Keep in mind, this article is addressing the B to B marketplace. Specifically, Services, Manufacturing and Distribution.

Depending upon the size of your organization, as a sales team member you may be the beneficiary of a well-organized marketing department’s efforts. However, in a smaller organization you may be pressed into the responsibility of doing the majority of your own marketing.

As a result, the individual’s activities may vary significantly. In a larger company with multiple marketing efforts underway, you may find that the leads are being scored for viability before they are passed to a sales team member.

Since we are aware that shoppers are doing product research before they reach out to a supplier, the speed of your response is important. History has proven that industrial shoppers will typically look at three suppliers before making a decision. Therefore, it is critical to respond rapidly or suffer the consequences.  

As a large B to B representative with a limited number of accounts to manage, it will be incumbent upon you to know all the buying influences and decision makers in your assigned account or geographic area. Never assume that you have the account sewed up just because you have a signed contract with your customer. In my experience, national account roll outs will experience push back from the dispersed facilities in favor of the old favored, local suppliers. These sites will require extra handholding until you develop a bond of trust. Work purposefully to develop relationships with your buying influences that will allow for open conversations about future demand.

Keep your ear to the ground with your contacts for internal changes that may spur demand growth. For example, in the refining and chemicals industry the annual overhaul and turnaround time periods could increase demand for products up to a as much as 20% or more.

Be sure to address problem issues or unique demands for products and services on a high priority basis. Your successful responses will develop a loyalty that will pay dividends for years to come. As you develop trust relationships, ask your current customers about opportunities inside and outside their company.

Watch for press releases, chamber of commerce websites, industry associations, and industrial publications for new expansions into your area of responsibility.  

Work diligently to become a subject matter expert regarding your products, company, industry, and the customer. Your ability to be a resource will promote respect and repeated business. And polish your presentation skills to the utmost.

As salespeople we tend to be activity junkies. Do not allow that mental pressure to sidetrack you into nonproductive activities. Be determined to dig into and bear down on the preparation required to serve the customer and stand out in your profession.

For the smaller business owner or sales manager, sales and marketing become a combined effort.

The foundational aspects of the marketing efforts must be in place. This starts with an informative, well-designed website that is rich in SEO words for your target market.

Your value proposition and differentiating benefits must be clearly stated on the website. In conjunction with the information is a landing page or communication link that allows for direct communication with the salesperson.

Since many smaller businesses are limited in time, money, and expertise to conduct digital marketing campaigns, it is imperative that you have a very specific target market identified. This means that only the title and department of the individual you need to contact, but the size of the company and whether they are independently owned or a branch operation of a corporate entity. Keep in mind that many of your potential key contacts at large accounts will not have the same decision-making authority as their counterparts in independently owned companies. Typically, the time to penetrate that account and close the business may be beyond what you can afford to invest. However, don’t punt upon first examination. You may want to involve higher management or a National Accounts team to pursue the opportunity.

Unless you are responsible for sales in a start-up, it will be best to start with an existing customer list and analyze who you should be calling on.

Use chamber guides, Google and Yelp to discover similar prospects in your target markets. Sign up for ThomasNet industry guides as a source for prospecting names.

By all means, have a viable, user friendly Customer Resource Management tool (CRM) to log contact information, track your efforts and log your results.

It is also possible to purchase lists of companies with key individuals based on SIC codes, geography, size, ownership, phone numbers, e-mail addresses and multiple other demographic criteria.

(Try Data-Axle and Hoovers/Dun&Bradstreet)

Depending upon the level of marketing automation and metrics you intend to establish, you make want to acquire a CRM platform that automates and tracks your engagement efforts.

(https://www.hubspot.com/ - Is well worth your investigation)                     Personally, I have used ACT as a CRM which also has some marketing integration available.

My personal preference for specific prospecting in a B to B world is a form of LinkedIN mining. The professional version does allow for more market segmentation; however, the non-paid version is powerful as well. Be sure to have a thorough personal profile oriented towards your services and a company profile that differentiates you from the company.

The process is to make connection requests into your target market, (expect 20-40% acceptance rate), capture their name and contact information into your CRM and e-mail platform database. Post informational insights about your industry and areas of interest daily. Publish articles from subject matter experts in your industry. Interact with other 1^st degree members about their posts.

Never forget that personal contacts are worth their weight in gold. Get involved in professional organizations that support your industry and develop relationships. Capitalize on past relationships from your previous selling efforts.

I am also highly in favor of e-mail campaigns into targeted market databases. This allows you to educate, entertain, and market to a large number of individuals in one single effort. The opens and click throughs from these letters allow you to continue your marketing efforts with some degree of familiarity. These platforms typically provide surveys, landing pages, marketing integration and product selling sites with the membership. (My provider has been Constant Contact since 2010)

Although not seen as a favorite among many salespeople, never forget the phone call as a viable tool. It would be best to determine your ROI before investing a large amount of time here. Or hire a lower paid associate or subcontract the effort out. You can expect 10-15 contacts per 100 calls. Depending upon your sales process and close rate, approximately 2% of those actual contacts have a probability of closing.  

You may also want to start following individuals on Twitter to find out about their likes, dislikes, and preferences before engaging with them. And of course, post your informational and marketing materials in Twitter as well.

Be sure to set up a YouTube account, shoot short informational videos and post several times a week. You can also post those links into your website and newsletters. Remember, many people are visual learners, and they will respond to a colorful graphic or video before they react to your written content.  

Trade show participation may be out of your budget; however, you still may be able to walk the floor, engage with people and obtain attendance lists. You may also want to register for the conference, attend breakout sessions and network with prospects and referral partners.

As you can see by the previous recommendations, there are plenty of activities to keep you extremely busy. However, as B to B professionals, never forget that your goal is to close business by personal contact. It is very easy to get pulled into the digital marketing world and lose that perspective.

We have moved from a world of Q & A, prepare, present, overcome objections and close. Work to have a solutions selling mentality as you uncover opportunities. As stated earlier that demands that you become a subject matter expert for every aspect of your capabilities and how that will solve the prospect’s issues.

As much as every professional salesperson is encouraged to focus on quality instead of quantity, it is still important to understand your prospecting numbers, close rate percentage and the length of your typical close cycle. 

For example, if your close rate from qualified prospects is 25%, and your acceptable close numbers are eight per month. Then the number of qualified prospects you need to have  on your close list (Sales pipeline) is relatively easy to figure out. 

(25/100 = 4)   8 closes x 4 = 32 prospects on the close list at any given time. If your prospecting efforts yield 100 leads per month that need to be contacted and you know that 32% will qualify to move on to your potential close list, then you are "on track" to keep your pipeline full and depend on your closing numbers to hit quota. If your sales and marketing efforts are not yielding the correct number of opportunities, then the effort needs to be analyzed to correct the number of prospects generated.

You must also understand the close cycle for your business. The length of time from initial contact to final close can vary greatly depending upon the category of product, dollar value of the item, capital budgeting process of your prospect, planning/purchasing rhythms in your market and the relative ease or difficulty in reaching the decision maker. As you are aware of your industry averages, the close expectations can be adjusted to help you understand the effort levels necessary to hit your plan.   

A last comment to the smaller B to B salespeople to develop and maintain a list of closable prospects. Stay on top of your close list with consistent reviews and obtain updates from your prospects to stay relevant.

Guerilla Marketing for Small to Medium Business Enterprises

The TOOL	Suggest Frequency
Company Name	Perennial
e-Stationery	Perennial
Business Card	Perennial
Website	Perennial
LinkedIN	Weekly posts/connections
YouTube	Weekly – Record & Post
Pinterest	Twice Weekly
Telephone Prospecting	3-5 Days a Week
Cold Calls	In Person: Bi–Weekly
1 to 1 In Person Meetings	2-3 a Week
Club/Association Memberships	Weekly/Bi-Weekly/Monthly
Social Media Posting	Daily – Informational
Newsletter (100 names to start)	Bi-Monthly – Monthly
Webinars	One per Month (or less)
QRP Codes	All Dispersed Informational
Direct Mail – Post Cards/Brochures	Monthly
Third Party Testimonials	On Website / As required
Speed of Your Response	Always!
Telephone Courtesy	A Learned Habit
Facebook /LinkedIn Groups	Once a Week
LinkedIn “Notifications” Work	2-3 Times per Week
Twitter	Post/Interact 2-3 Times Per Week
Personal/Business Tag Line Ten Words or Less	Constant Use
CRM Platform in Use	Constant – Tracking /Follow up
LinkedIN / Facebook Business Page	Constant Visible Presence
Advertising Give Aways	Pens / Paperweights / USB’s
Door Prizes	On Opportunity
Create a power group	Share / Ask for Referrals
Attend Mixers / Networking Grps	Weekly
Your Personal Demeanor	Personable / Open / Inviting Assertive – Not Aggressive

 

Go forth and sell!

 

Author: Gary D. Seale – MBA Trucon Communications

             www.truconbd.com

  

 

 

 

Author: Mike Lieberman - CEO   Square2

Eight Barriers to Sales Success

What sets successful companies apart is their ability to strategically overcome these 

sales challenges. They have marketing and sales teams who work together, 

and they have shared goals, KPIs and metrics.

Here’s how you can achieve something similar at your company.

1. Finding Qualified Leads

Attracting tons of new leads isn’t always a good thing. It should be about quality over quantity — you want to ensure you attract qualified leads. It doesn’t make sense for a rep to spend time talking to someone who isn’t ready to buy. 

This will help you segment the people who are researching versus those people who are ready to talk to sales. You should be treating those in the early stages of their buyer journey differently than those people in the late stages of their buyer journey. 

It typically works better to put more qualified leads into your sales process when they are deeper in their buyer journey while troduces your company to people who might be early in their buyer journey.

This is especially important when you talk about needing to nurture leads that are early buyer journey leads when compared to leads who are late stage.

Creating proactive lead nurture email campaigns can actually pull prospects through the buyer journey and signal to reps when leads are ready to buy. 

 

2. Getting A Response from Prospects

No matter how you’re communicating with prospects, your message needs to be compelling. To move your prospects to respond, you first need to develop a disruptive, compelling and emotional message.

One single email or phone call won’t be enough to grab their attention. Rather, send out a series of communications that address the challenges your prospects are facing.

According to Top Performance in Sales Prospecting research, it takes an average of eight touches to get an initial meeting (or other conversion) with a new prospect.

Today, many of these can be automated with tools like HubSpot, Conversica and Salesforce. Reps can concentrate on talking with prospects who are ready to buy while the workflow automation sends email and nurtures prospects who are NOT ready in the background. 

Don’t tell them how awesome your company is. Instead, provide your prospects with valuable and relevant information. Delivering the right message to the right person at the right time will dramatically increase your response rates.

Having the right content is also important at this point. Marketing needs to know what content sales needs to help prospects feel safe and sign. Delivering content in context to your sales conversations helps shorten the sales cycle and increases close rates. 

3. Standing Apart From Competitors

How can your sales reps help set your company apart from the competition? By building meaningful relationships with prospects and customers. Remember that every customer touchpoint represents your brand. Great customer service will turn your customers into brand evangelists.

Demonstrate your passion to help them by being selfless and offering expert knowledge. If your business isn’t the best solution for them, offer suggestions for better options. While it may seem crazy not to push for that sale, this is a great way to build trust.

A contact may refer someone else to your business based on your honesty. Or if their situation changes in the future, they’ll come back to you.

Showing you have your prospects’ best interests at heart is one of the best ways to stand apart from your competitors.  If you want to formalize this more, and you should, consider a revamped sales process. 

The best way to stand out from your competitors is to give your prospects a more remarkable sales experience. The more you guide them instead of sell them, the more you advise them instead of push them and the more you help them instead of trying to convince them, the more you'll close. 

Also understand, if you have a process and even one person doesn’t follow it, you don’t have a process. If you have a process and it’s not documented, you don’t have a process. If you have a process but you don’t measure against it, you don’t have a process.

For your sales to be scalable, repeatable and predictable--you need a documented, measured and trained sales process that everyone follows, every day. You can read more about that here.

 

4. Asking The Right Questions

Asking prospects the right questions is the best way to understand their wants, needs, and pain points.

While you might be tempted to make a pitch right away, don’t. Rushing the process won’t get you far. Instead, ask insightful questions to determine whether you can help your prospects and in what ways.

To ask the right questions, your sales team needs to be well-prepared. Avoid asking yes or no questions—there’s not much you can do with a one-word response. Don’t ask three questions at the same time without giving your prospect a chance to respond. Be patient and give them time to consider one question at a time.

Don't wing it either. Consider creating a document with all the relevant questions and use them as needed. This is an excellent way to match content to the questions you're asking. 

For example, many people come to us asking about a new website. But after our discussions and thoughtful questions, it's not the website they want but more leads, better leads and more sales-ready leads. 

Now we can help them and we provide even additional content that helps them understand how, why and what we'll do for them.

5. Staying Motivated

Your sales reps’ motivation affects their productivity, your company culture, and your bottom line. To effectively motivate your reps, you first need to know what drives them.

Salespeople aren’t all the same; every person requires different incentives and motivational tactics. Work with each individual sales rep to determine what will work best for them. Set tangible goals that your reps can work to accomplish. Without goals, they won’t know what success looks like. Then, celebrate your team’s wins to boost morale.

Another important way to keep your team motivated is to invest in sales coaching. When you empower sales managers to be better coaches, you’ll help boost motivation and sales performance for the entire team.

6. Spending Too Much Time On Administrative Tasks

Today’s sales reps spend less than 36% of their time selling. Administrative tasks like inputting data and generating reports eat up most of your sales reps’ precious time.

Fortunately, sales enablement tools and sales technology can automate most non-revenue-generating tasks. With the right tools at their disposal, your reps will have more time to devote to core sales activities.

Meetings scheduler tools, for example, allow prospects to instantly book time in your reps’ calendars and avoid long email chains.

Email templates will also save your reps time. While they’ll still need to tailor their messages, having a template to work with for following up, recapping calls, and more will help boost efficiency.

Today, if traveling to see prospects is problematic using video tools like Zoom allows for the face-to-face interactions reps and customer love. If you need help taking your face-to-face reps to video, let us know.

We can get you set you up on Zoom in a single day, train your reps and get them talking to prospects within days, not weeks or months.  

7. Maintaining Customer Relationships Post-Sale

The deal might be signed, but that doesn’t mean your sales rep’s job is over. Once your prospect becomes a customer, your salespeople still have to work on maintaining and building their trust. Otherwise, they risk losing their hard-won business.

Regularly check in with your customers to discuss their experiences so far and to ensure they’re happy. Take advantage of marketing automation to keep track of your customers’ engagement levels, and send them personalized emails.

Nurturing your current clients will keep them invested in your brand. And it’s a lot easier to upsell a happy client. Upselling can actually bring in more revenue than signing new customers—and with less effort.

Don’t leave money on the table—maintain strong relationships with all your current customers.

8. How To Effectively Team Sell

The sales process works best as a team sport. Working as a team helps you develop innovative solutions to obstacles and allows everyone to benefit from each other’s knowledge and experience.

But an effective team is not just made up of strong individuals. Your sales reps are probably used to being lone wolves and will need help to develop their team selling skills. To support team selling, you need to foster a culture of collaboration.

Regular communication is crucial to avoid a disjointed selling process. Define each individual person’s role and decide on one central person to lead.

 

 

Start Today Tip - Sales is changing just as quickly as marketing. What had been an art, is now a science and technology is making it easier and easier to engage with prospects, qualify them, take them through a content rich process, score them and turn them into new customers faster and more efficiently than ever before. You'll want to start with your sales process. Document it, train it and measure it. Then you'll quickly see where the areas of improvement are and how it will help your company close more new business. 

 Defining Sales Engagement

July 27, 2017

The notion of sales engagement is still emerging across sales organizations. According to Forrester, less than just 10% of sales leaders are truly confident in their sales activity data.

Sales teams want and deserve better data.

The vast majority (70%) of companies leading the charge in implementing and optimizing sales engagement platforms (SEPs) are seeing higher win rates and more streamlined processes.

What is Sales Engagement?

Sales engagement can be defined as the interactions that take place between a buyer and seller, and can be measured in time and touch points. For example, a buyer’s view time on a presentation or webinar, or whether he or she viewed or clicked on an email. These are measurements of sales engagement.

A sales engagement platform is a system of engagement that compliments a system of record—like a CRM—and is comprised of five key components: content management, communications, predictive analytics, CRM integration, and partner applications.

A Modern History of Sales Engagement
If we look at the entire history of sales, it would be worthwhile to mention the revolutionary transitions of sales materials from handwritten to printed to digitized, as well as door-to-door selling to emailing, to calling, to screensharing. Nevertheless, modern advances—depicted here—illustrate the major events in recent history that have led us to the current state of sales engagement.

Sales engagement started as just the name of function and has now become its own technology sector. As selling and buying cycles became more complicated, this function was ripe for the introduction of software to help alleviate the complexity. With the introduction of technology vendors around 2009, a new sector of tools was born. As sales engagement platforms gain exposure and traction, they’ll continue to revolutionize the sales process as we know it.

Sales Engagement vs Sales Enablement

The genesis of sales enablement was founded on the idea that sales professionals need to be appropriately equipped with certain resources in order to effectively do their jobs. Thus, there have always been two distinct areas of focus when it comes to sales enablement: internally empowering the sales force and externally engaging with prospects.

The problem is, that while most sales enablement technologies are designed to facilitate the creation and management of necessary materials and processes for sales, they forget about the most important part— measuring the efficacy of those materials and processes during prospect and customer interactions. This is the key difference between sales enablement and sales engagement, and where sales engagement technology comes in.

As Aragon Research puts it:

“While Sales Enablement is the current buzzword in the sales space, the Sales Engagement Platform (SEP), a new Digital Selling Platform that integrates with CRM, is the key to empowering sales professionals in the digital era.”

The Impact of Sales Engagement on the Sales Force

How Sales Engagement Improves Coaching & Onboarding
According to CSO Insights, over 70% of companies take six months or longer to ramp new sales reps to productivity—with the opportunity to reach proficiency at about 9 months. And with an average annual sales turnover of 25–30% across industries as reported by the Harvard Business Review, sales leaders must be sure to hire and train wisely during the six to nine month ramp up time.

Many sales leaders may think they are dedicating the appropriate amount of time and resources to onboarding and coaching their new sales reps, but industry data suggests otherwise. CSO Insights reports that only 24% of firms claim to have a formal process for sharing best practices. These trends are negatively impacting sales teams, as SiriusDecisions states that 64% of high-performing sales professionals cite a lack of on-going training as impactful on their decision to leave their jobs.

A sales engagement platform can help create better onboarding and coaching by:

• Identifying which activities, content, and tactics drive successful customer interactions
• Establishing benchmarks for every stage of sales talent management lifecycle
• Monitoring and comparing individual and team results, identifying top performers and struggling reps, and setting performance benchmarks
• Tracking training usage and gaining visibility into how sales reps consume content and training with engagement analytics
• Combining sales and customer usage and engagement analytics to optimize future training and sales effectiveness investments

According to SiriusDecisions, by appropriately training and supporting your sales force with a sales engagement platform, you can potentially increase the tenure of your sales reps by 40%-65%.

How Sales Engagement Optimizes Content Management
The rollercoaster relationship between sales and marketing is full of its ups and downs. Sales enablement can help to bridge gaps among the two departments, but often there are still holes to be filled. In fact, the CMO Council reports that 56% of sales and marketing professionals claim their companies don’t have prescriptive processes to align the two. One of the business aspects that suffers the most in these situations is content.

Content has always been a struggle for sales, and for that reason, it is a primary function of sales engagement. Still, sales reps spend on average 440 hours per year, or 22% of their time, searching for the right content according to the Aberdeen Group. In many cases, marketing is providing sales with most of the content they need, but CSO Insights reports that only 35% of content created by marketing meets the expectations of sales.

A sales engagement platform can greatly improve the quantity and quality of content by:

• Housing sales content, marketing collateral, tools, and customer-facing materials in a single place that supports all file types
• Creating and recommending marketing collateral by sales stage, customer-facing role, or industry
• Recommending content based on engagement analytics to guide reps to the appropriate next step
• Updating and controlling content access to ensure that customer facing content is always accurate and up to date

How Sales Engagement Powers Email Campaigns
Though communication channels have expanded, the Harvard Business Review reports that 60% of customers still prefer to interact with sales reps by email. Sales engagement goes beyond tracking open and click rates to providing granular visibility into how prospects and customers actually interact with the content that sales and marketing distribute.

A sales engagement platform can transform the way email campaigns are conducted by:

• Customizing templates with integrates content which reps can quickly access for large blasts or 1:1 communication with prospects and customers
• Controlling content by collecting viewer contact information, limiting forwards, restricting downloads, and setting content expirations
• Getting advanced tracking metrics like real-time alerts of email stats (opens, clicks, and forwards) and detailed email content engagement (page-by-page analytics) to prioritize and customize follow-up

Sales teams can now go beyond tedious email practices to leveraging state-of-the-art technology powered by sales engagement platforms to reach a more target audience with personalized content.

How Sales Engagement Saves Reps Time with Autolog
If you were to ask a sales rep if they spend enough time with prospects and customers, if they’re honest, they’d more than likely say no. According to CSO Insights, only 35% of a sales rep’s time is spent interacting with customers. That’s because there are many other administrative tasks that take up their time.

Sales engagement platforms help alleviate the time a sales rep spends logging information back into the CRM by:

• Automatically capturing and logging activity and engagement data across all communication channels
• All rep activity—including emails, online and in-person meetings, content used, and resulting customer engagement—are all auto-logged back to the appropriate records
• Improving CRM data quality so all new activity is clean and up to date

Sales reps will have more time to dedicate to prospecting and moving opportunities further along in the sales cycle, and of course, closing more deals.

How Sales Engagement Provides Valuable Analytics
We know that teams are hungry for good data. Forrester reports that over 90% of sales leaders lack confidence in their activity data and that 77% of marketers rate a lack of analytics to guide their marketing decision-making as a top challenge.

 

4 Ways to Strengthen Sales Analytics

AUTHOR

• Mark Powell and Donnie Williamson

DATE

• February 18, 2022 | MDM | Distribution Intelligence

Companies now are relying on internal and external data collection to improve sales processes, shore up market planning and weather supply chain issues.

The volatility of the past two years has thrown even the best sales and market planning teams into higher blood-pressure mode. For that reason, the value of data analytics has elevated quickly to cut through the fog of mixed signals and pre-COVID-based assumptions. The good news is that you can strengthen your sales analytics with solid methods today that benchmark change effectively. That will put your team in position to make better decisions on where to focus sales resources.

Leveraging analytics can improve distributors’ market planning ability by moving actionable data to the front lines. MDM Analytics’ Bob Jordan and Donnie Williamson recently outlined some keys to extracting more value out of data during an MDM webcast (view on-demand). The key takeaways from their presentation include how to use the analytical building blocks of data quality, segmentation, sweet spot analysis, market share and wallet share to set better quotas and growth goals. Here are four actionable steps from the webcast that distributors can take in 2022 to ensure sales teams and growth plans are directed by smart data collection and analytic processes:

Find a ‘Data Champion’

One of the best opportunities to focus sales teams is to use data to target the highest potential accounts and segments. This includes hiring or empowering someone to champion data efforts and interests. Hiring people who understand data — but also know the distribution business well — can produce qualitative and quantitative data that will prove vital. To know where to focus, distributors need an understanding of where they are currently providing the most value and driving profits. This can only be done with a well-segmented list of their customers and what industries they’re serving, preferably by NAICS or SIC. With an understanding of what type of companies are driving the most profitability, they know they can target the same type of customers that are not currently customers. All good analysis has both qualitative and quantitative components, and it’s critical that the analyst has proficiencies in both. A business-minded data analyst will be able to spot glaring issues in the data before they reach the consumer, and this goes a long way in helping folks trust the data.

Prioritize Data Quality

Whether it’s creating internal data collection processes or reaching out to a third party, quality is king when it comes to analytics. Clean and trusted data is the foundation to any analysis, and the phrase “garbage-in, garbage out” is more than a maxim. Whether a company’s data is currently unmanaged — or they have a “data team” — it’s imperative that they manage their data well and deepen their data journey today. Entrusting a third party to clean and enhance data is a great option for those just starting their analytics journey but building out well-defined data strategy is the target. With each step comes better outcomes, minimizing the short- and long-term effects of less-than-stellar data.

Define Data that Moves the Needle

Reliable data is great starting point; but the real power is the ability to generate actionable insights that drive well-informed decisions leading to increased market share. Actionable data allows distributors to determine whether they are selling to the correct customers and leveraging external market intelligence can allow companies to prepare for critical factors such as expected market change and inflationary increases. Many leading businesses with seasoned data strategies have adopted the coupling of both internal and external market data to generate game-changing growth strategies. They have a clear picture of who their customers and the markets they serve. They know the products that provide the most value through their supply chain and can shift and act quickly to unforeseen changes. Having a clear picture of how a business is doing in comparison to the rest of the market will provide the information needed to better accomplish goals.

Build a Data-Driven Sales Process

Here’s a shocker: Sales people don’t always know what the total opportunity is at either a specific account or a territory. It’s a process to move from data-free to data-driven discussions on where a salesperson should spend time. It’s possible to build a model using historic transaction data to bring data to the table. And for most market verticals, there are sources of external market data to strengthen the way your team can model market and account opportunity. Whether a distributor home grows the process or contracts out, it will open a path toward enhanced focus during turbulent market times. It’s a proven formula. Companies that improve their use of data analytics give their sales teams a competitive edge to increase revenues by targeting and growing the highest-potential accounts.